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The whole nature of coding is that is essentially motivationally self-taught. As for automation- that’s what better coders do. Perhaps this is being confused

by aj7 7y ago

The whole nature of coding is that is essentially motivationally self-taught. As for automation- that’s what better coders do. Perhaps this is being confused with “Find a good problem that motivates you, and fight a knock-down, drag-out battle to solve it.”

ethbro 7y ago
Programmers drastically underestimate the amount of poor abstractions we've created. There's no reason someone should have to learn object oriented programming in order to be able to do 4 actions across 2 apps. Fundamentally, that's what this article was getting at for me. Should we (a) encourage more people to learn to code (in existing languages / frameworks), so that they might use coding to automate their own work, or (b) identify simplified systems that require less knowledge, but are sufficient for the automation tasks being asked of them. I love learning about multi-level cache heirarchies and performance effects thereof. But I would rather my company's accountants instead know the accounting-equivalent of that bit of trivia, and yet gain the benefit of being able to write simple automation on their computers.
- solinent 7y ago
  To put what you've said more succinctly, even though reductionism is valid for a computer, there is no reason for us to reduce everyone to transistors. My mother is an accountant for example, and she could easily pick up SQL or a programming language, but the issue with teaching her one is that it doesn't solve any of her immediate problems. Excel already automates most of that work away, so for her that's all she needs. Your company's accountants can probably write excel statements that are equivalent to complex SQL statements, so I wouldn't underestimate them :)
  - dsjimi 7y ago
    Excel is the world's most popular IDE ;)
    - ethbro 7y ago
      One of my weed out questions in programming interviews is to ask their opinion on Excel. Specifically, strengths and weaknesses. If they don't come up with at least one strength or spend the whole answer bashing it, that's an instant reject for any position touching UX.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        I could bash it in ways you probably haven't heard before... The clashing paradigms of the Data Model and "vanilla" Excel have really been aggravating me recently. I feel like Excel is underutilized for cultural reasons and it seems like it can do anything I was previously asked to use Qlikview for. But the fundamental reason I am using Excel these days is because I don't want to be subjected to a programming interview, ever again. I got my current job without any particular technical requirements, and the interview was entirely about how I manage my time and multitask.
  - wiseleo 7y ago
    If only she knew she could interact with Excel using SQL. I have shown that to some accountants and saw lightbulbs appear over their heads. :)
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      Are you talking about querying databases from Excel, or querying tables in your spreadsheet as if it was a database?
- entelechy0 7y ago
  "There's no reason someone should have to learn object oriented programming in order to be able to do 4 actions across 2 apps." Object-oriented programming is extremely simple and is taught in high school and earlier.
noelwelsh 7y ago
I'm struggling to parse "essentially motivationally self-taught" but if you mean to say something like "only self-taught programmers will successfully learn to program" that's a myth that isn't backed up by the evidence and serves to exclude people from programming. This talk addresses that misconception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ The paper discusses "constructionism" (which, loosely put, is the idea you give someone a toy and let them figure it out): http://morganya.org/research/2018-Ames-CSCW-Constructionism.pdf http://morganya.org/research/2018-Ames-CSCW-Constructionism.... There is more out there but that's all I have time to find right now.
- hhas01 7y ago
  Yeah, decades of dragging myself over programming’s coals have made me super cynical, but I think that lots of programmers are really good at building tools and knowledge that are horribly inaccessible to anyone not already like them. And then being surprised and unhappy that no-one else appreciates what it is they do. If the barrier to programming is raised so high that only a career programmer can do it, all that happens is we end up with lots of users—professional experts in their own problem domains, mind—who don’t understand programming, and a bunch of professional programmers who don’t understand anything else. And then those programmers complain bitterly because they don’t understand why users hate so much the systems they’ve built for them. And yet, Seymour Papert demonstrated how to make computing open and accessible to eight year-olds, back in an age when cutting-edge HCI was a fricking Teletype! So it’s definitely an instance of PEBKAC; it’s just a matter of which chair.

by aj7 7y ago

ethbro 7y ago

Programmers drastically underestimate the amount of poor abstractions we've created. There's no reason someone should have to learn object oriented programming in order to be able to do 4 actions across 2 apps. Fundamentally, that's what this article was getting at for me. Should we (a) encourage more people to learn to code (in existing languages / frameworks), so that they might use coding to automate their own work, or (b) identify simplified systems that require less knowledge, but are sufficient for the automation tasks being asked of them. I love learning about multi-level cache heirarchies and performance effects thereof. But I would rather my company's accountants instead know the accounting-equivalent of that bit of trivia, and yet gain the benefit of being able to write simple automation on their computers.

solinent 7y ago
To put what you've said more succinctly, even though reductionism is valid for a computer, there is no reason for us to reduce everyone to transistors. My mother is an accountant for example, and she could easily pick up SQL or a programming language, but the issue with teaching her one is that it doesn't solve any of her immediate problems. Excel already automates most of that work away, so for her that's all she needs. Your company's accountants can probably write excel statements that are equivalent to complex SQL statements, so I wouldn't underestimate them :)
- dsjimi 7y ago
  Excel is the world's most popular IDE ;)
  - ethbro 7y ago
    One of my weed out questions in programming interviews is to ask their opinion on Excel. Specifically, strengths and weaknesses. If they don't come up with at least one strength or spend the whole answer bashing it, that's an instant reject for any position touching UX.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      I could bash it in ways you probably haven't heard before... The clashing paradigms of the Data Model and "vanilla" Excel have really been aggravating me recently. I feel like Excel is underutilized for cultural reasons and it seems like it can do anything I was previously asked to use Qlikview for. But the fundamental reason I am using Excel these days is because I don't want to be subjected to a programming interview, ever again. I got my current job without any particular technical requirements, and the interview was entirely about how I manage my time and multitask.
- wiseleo 7y ago
  If only she knew she could interact with Excel using SQL. I have shown that to some accountants and saw lightbulbs appear over their heads. :)
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Are you talking about querying databases from Excel, or querying tables in your spreadsheet as if it was a database?
entelechy0 7y ago
"There's no reason someone should have to learn object oriented programming in order to be able to do 4 actions across 2 apps." Object-oriented programming is extremely simple and is taught in high school and earlier.

noelwelsh 7y ago

I'm struggling to parse "essentially motivationally self-taught" but if you mean to say something like "only self-taught programmers will successfully learn to program" that's a myth that isn't backed up by the evidence and serves to exclude people from programming. This talk addresses that misconception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ The paper discusses "constructionism" (which, loosely put, is the idea you give someone a toy and let them figure it out): http://morganya.org/research/2018-Ames-CSCW-Constructionism.pdf http://morganya.org/research/2018-Ames-CSCW-Constructionism.... There is more out there but that's all I have time to find right now.

hhas01 7y ago
Yeah, decades of dragging myself over programming’s coals have made me super cynical, but I think that lots of programmers are really good at building tools and knowledge that are horribly inaccessible to anyone not already like them. And then being surprised and unhappy that no-one else appreciates what it is they do. If the barrier to programming is raised so high that only a career programmer can do it, all that happens is we end up with lots of users—professional experts in their own problem domains, mind—who don’t understand programming, and a bunch of professional programmers who don’t understand anything else. And then those programmers complain bitterly because they don’t understand why users hate so much the systems they’ve built for them. And yet, Seymour Papert demonstrated how to make computing open and accessible to eight year-olds, back in an age when cutting-edge HCI was a fricking Teletype! So it’s definitely an instance of PEBKAC; it’s just a matter of which chair.