4 ms·

The title is a bit hyperbolic but I enjoyed the sentiments nonetheless. I definitely remember as a kid learning Lua scripting because of video games. Just goin

The title is a bit hyperbolic but I enjoyed the sentiments nonetheless. I definitely remember as a kid learning Lua scripting because of video games. Just going over forum posts trying to make my own games or break other games. Definitely gave me the basis to rocket ahead when I took a formal CS class.

DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
[flagged]
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  When I was in college, there were basically two completely separate tiers of people in CS classes: People who knew how to program already, and people who didn't It was pretty nuts. The class was tuned to make it possible for non-coders to learn coding basics along with basics about data structures, compilers, blah blah blah. So for people who could already implement something like fizzbuzz, the class was a joke. We'd get an assignment to store something in a linked list and print it out, and some of the students made fully 3D animated demoscene demos out of it. (It just goes to show that treating college degrees like job programs is a terrible idea, if you ask me..)
  - DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
    Oh, my point was that the parent comment was being obnoxious by calling out the hyperbolic title (which is a totally normal place for hyperbole) when they themselves used hyperbole to tell their own anecdote. Like it was just a dumb thing to call out. I do agree that students who come into college often have an advantage, but they often have less of an advantage than they think, and it costs them because they end up not actually learning some of the less obvious skills that are being taught in a course setting. I found that the _best_ students in my cohort were those who started college with almost no programming experience but put in a lot of work. The next batch were those who came in with significant experience but were willing to reflect on it and adapt to the new information. Then kind of everybody else was mixed in depending on how they had taken things individually with no clear distinction between those with prior experience and those without.
  - fnimick 3y ago
    This is why I like that Northeastern does their intro class in a Racket / Scheme dialect. (plug for https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/ as IMO the best way to learn computer science) The goal is to learn how to think about problem solving and program design, not simply to make the computer do what you want. I found that (myself included) people who came in with experience in imperative languages, etc. had a harder time than people who came in fresh. But the takeaways around functional programming, data structure design, testing, etc are far more important for a career than the ability to make some arbitrary program do some arbitrary thing.
    - lanstin 3y ago
      Maybe, but the ability to make some arbitrary program do some arbitrary thing is the exact experience that lead many of us to fall in love with computing. 10 FOR X = -5 TO 5 20 PRINT TAB(XX);"" 30 NEXT X wow, a parabola!

DonaldPShimoda 3y ago

[flagged]

Firmwarrior 3y ago
When I was in college, there were basically two completely separate tiers of people in CS classes: People who knew how to program already, and people who didn't It was pretty nuts. The class was tuned to make it possible for non-coders to learn coding basics along with basics about data structures, compilers, blah blah blah. So for people who could already implement something like fizzbuzz, the class was a joke. We'd get an assignment to store something in a linked list and print it out, and some of the students made fully 3D animated demoscene demos out of it. (It just goes to show that treating college degrees like job programs is a terrible idea, if you ask me..)
- DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
  Oh, my point was that the parent comment was being obnoxious by calling out the hyperbolic title (which is a totally normal place for hyperbole) when they themselves used hyperbole to tell their own anecdote. Like it was just a dumb thing to call out. I do agree that students who come into college often have an advantage, but they often have less of an advantage than they think, and it costs them because they end up not actually learning some of the less obvious skills that are being taught in a course setting. I found that the _best_ students in my cohort were those who started college with almost no programming experience but put in a lot of work. The next batch were those who came in with significant experience but were willing to reflect on it and adapt to the new information. Then kind of everybody else was mixed in depending on how they had taken things individually with no clear distinction between those with prior experience and those without.
- fnimick 3y ago
  This is why I like that Northeastern does their intro class in a Racket / Scheme dialect. (plug for https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/ as IMO the best way to learn computer science) The goal is to learn how to think about problem solving and program design, not simply to make the computer do what you want. I found that (myself included) people who came in with experience in imperative languages, etc. had a harder time than people who came in fresh. But the takeaways around functional programming, data structure design, testing, etc are far more important for a career than the ability to make some arbitrary program do some arbitrary thing.
  - lanstin 3y ago
    Maybe, but the ability to make some arbitrary program do some arbitrary thing is the exact experience that lead many of us to fall in love with computing. 10 FOR X = -5 TO 5 20 PRINT TAB(XX);"" 30 NEXT X wow, a parabola!