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It is kind of frustrating how pervasive the "programming can be learned in an afternoon" mindset is, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Pardon me fo
by commandlinefan 4y ago
It is kind of frustrating how pervasive the "programming can be learned in an afternoon" mindset is, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Pardon me for being insulted by the insinuation that something that took me 40 years to become as proficient as I am with it can be mastered by everybody else in a few months.
- Jtsummers 4y agoProgramming can be learned in an afternoon, just not mastered.
- wittycardio 4y agoNo. Some syntax can be learned in an afternoon, that's it
- Jtsummers 4y agoEh, my experience suggests otherwise. I've taught Python to high schoolers and adults in an afternoon. Were they doing anything terribly interesting? Not really, but they were making their own programs. They still had a lot to learn, mind you, but they did learn to program.
- maxbond 4y agoDo you think they would've been able to independently solve a problem/design a program after just one session? Genuinely curious. I've had limited experience teaching people to program, but my experience has been that people teach themselves to program and you can only really be a resource for them. You can teach syntax easily but design and problem solving seem impossible to transfer; you can make the process easier but they have to teach it to themselves.
- maxbond 4y agoAddendum: I'm currently volunteering with a project teaching middle school children to program, and I am impressed by how much they're able to accomplish after a single lesson. I'm not sure they're independently designing programs or solving problems, but they're definitely independently exploring the space adjacent to the example programs by experimenting, and they're making sense of the results and learning. It helps that this is a graphical/block environment where they're able to discover syntax and keywords on their own, and ingest the program output as cool patterns/behaviors.
- wittycardio 4y agoI would categorize that as learning syntax tbh.
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoHave to stipulate definitions about what "learn" means. It's neither binary nor mastery. I would say syntax counts if you can do things that didn't happen on their own beforehand without copy & pasting.
- jcranmer 4y ago> Pardon me for being insulted by the insinuation that something that took me 40 years to become as proficient as I am with it can be mastered by everybody else in a few months. I don't think anyone who claims that "programming can be learned in an afternoon" understands that to mean "programming can be mastered in an afternoon". Mastery comes, in large part, from experience, and there is no shortcut to experience.
- Ancapistani 4y agoI mean... chess can be learned in an afternoon, too. A few minutes of memorizing the standard movements of each piece followed by maybe a half hour of learning the exceptions (castling, en passant, etc.) and you've "learned how to play chess". A handful of games later and you start to get a feel for the relative importance of the pieces. I wouldn't argue that anyone expects to be competitive with a grandmaster at that point, though.
- trap_goes_hot 4y agoThere is always a programmer better than you, as with any skill. In my practical view, programming is using a tool to solve a problem, not a game.
- sedeki 4y agoWhy are you insulted by such a claim if you know it's naive and false?
- headhasthoughts 4y agoWhy should you be offended that learning materials are improving, toolchains are getting easier, and net access is available to all now? It's like complaining that automatics exist. You can still drive manual! You have that on people! But fundamentally it is a simpler field than it was then, due to the gigabytes of abstraction for every little thing you can do with a computer now. That points toward an attribution error or a fundamental insecurity.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y agoThis is not at all what the poster is saying.