4 ms·

I have about 200k+ unique visitors a day reading my books, and over a million since I started tracking in May last year. I have comments on nearly every exerci

by zedshaw 15y ago

I have about 200k+ unique visitors a day reading my books, and over a million since I started tracking in May last year. I have comments on nearly every exercise on my books, which means people are actually going through them. I have 2200 people taking my udemy course which is the most popular paid class on the site (last time I checked). My books are used in workshops all over the world, have readers from all over the world, and have taught people from nearly every age group that can read English. And my books do exactly what this article says you shouldn't do. I'd say if nobody wants to learn basic programming concepts from you, then it's not the concepts, it's you.

angelbob 15y ago
Zed, you're awesome. With that said -- it's who you're teaching that lets you say this. Right now there are people who know they want to learn programming coming hell or high water, and you do a damn fine job teaching them. There are also a whole lot of people who might want to write apps, but do not want to go through the pain of learning programming. The audience of Scratch, from MIT, is the narrow end of this giant wedge of people. They have nowhere to go from there because nobody else does it that way. I miss the Apple II. It actually had a few on-ramps for people like that. Those on-ramps are pretty much dead now, though I have no idea why. The guy writing this article isn't aiming at your set of programmers. He's aiming at all the people who aren't programming but would love to be able to build apps of one kind or another. There are a lot of them, and even a lot who could, and who we do a terrible job of teaching.
- zedshaw 15y ago
  And no, I'm saying it's a huge myth that nobody wants to learn the "hard stuff". They do, you just have to teach it right. After that you just have people who aren't interested in programming at all and no amount of graphics, games, or cute cartoons is going to make them want to. You can't force or trick enlightenment on people. But more importantly, I have evidence to back my beliefs. This article has absolutely no evidence.
  - Schultzy 15y ago
    I'm glad to be a piece of your evidence. I have college degrees in Entrepreneurship and Marketing and have been just a "non-tech" guy for too long. I got tired of not being able to build anything myself, so I'm working my way through your book right now. Of course I have a specific application in mind that I'd like to build, and perhaps this is evidence of my naivete, but it seems like if I were to just learn how to do that, I would be limiting my creativity. The difference between learning how to program only a specific type of application and learning to program in general seems like the difference between learning how to paint a bowl a fruit and studying the art of painting. What happens when you want to paint a bowl of fruit with a landscape behind it? Again, I may just be one fool, but it is not the allure of being able to program a specific application that I am after, it is the pain of being ignorant that I am trying to assuage.
    - stanleydrew 15y ago
      You present a false dichotomy. You don't have to choose to just learn how to program one kind of program or how to program generally. You can do both. And in my experience, having an idea and executing on it is a great way to start. You get instant gratification in learning one small subset of programming and you move on from there.
  - AlSweigart 15y ago
    Hi Zed, I'm Al, the author of article. I'll admit the title is hyperbole. There are people who want to learn programming for the sake of programming, just like there are people who like learning math even though they don't see immediate practical applications. I teach programming to a tiny class of 10-12 year olds on Saturday mornings, and have taught a couple one-off classes at Stanford's Splash program to a classes of a dozen students. I've found that having an end-goal in mind of what they will create is a much better hook than just explaining what for loops are (or the idiosyncrasies of the languages are, which Python & Ruby are good about keeping to a minimum.) I don't think graphics and cute cartoons are needed to make programming engaging either. My book "Invent with Python" has games that use ascii text up until the last few chapters. There's a pretty low standard for games/programs that are cool enough to show off to other people, but nobody ever shows off code snippets. I think the best thing about "Learn Python the Hard Way" over a book like O'Reilly's "Learning Python" is that your book cuts it down to the bare concepts: "Type this. This should appear. This is what is happening." That's great compared to most computer books where there are paragraphs upon paragraphs that could be whittled down to a single sentence or cut out entirely. "Learn Python the Hard Way" is barely over 200 pages. That's much more digestible than some 600 page tome. I just think that many classes where the students aren't CS majors or necessarily dedicated to learning programming forget that it's not just the concepts that people want to learn but what they can make using those concepts. Small games and web apps are great for that. Like in Exercise 22 of your book says, "It’s important when you are doing a boring mindless memorization exercise like this to know why. It helps you focus on a goal and know the purpose of all your efforts."
keithpeter 15y ago
Hello Zed and all A few of us have even bought one of your books :-) My mature students taking basic maths courses in the UK will read the textbook and come back at me with questions that show they have confronted the material and put some time into it. The teenagers need a different approach, games, Web sites with interactive material, carefully chosen written material. Have you any age data about your participants? Perhaps the video courses?
- zedshaw 15y ago
  The age range for my courses is 11 to 65 so far, but I haven't been able to get statistics on the median. It's a touchy subject to ask folks their age, but my guess is the median is about 30, or that it's bimodal with 20 being one hump, and 30 being another. Another thing to keep in mind is that a computer is already interactive. The idea that you need "graphics" to get students interested is completely unfounded, and the only data comes from experiments from companies trying to sell graphical programming systems for education sales. Even then these studies were done in the 70's and 80's when many people just didn't have computers. In my experience I've found just making simple text adventure games is entertaining enough. Think about it: It's a game that is approachable by anyone, they are fun, they involve writing, their "graphics" are immediate, they don't require any geometry, and the output looks a lot like the program itself. That's why I teach them. They're easy but still fun. My experience says you don't need crazy amounts of sensory input to keep people interested, and in fact is just distracts them and frustrates them. Keep it simple, but make sure it has depth that they can discover.
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    I would imagine the reason kids are likely to prefer graphics is because the games they play involve a lot of graphics so that's what they expect. I remember in the early 90s plugging away writing various text games in QBASIC then excitedly showing them to school friends who's reaction was mostly "too much reading, not enough guns. Let's play Doom instead". Of course this was somewhat disheartening and put me off programming for a few years. The closest thing that I've seen to a comprehensive game creation "kit" is Unity3d but that has a pretty steep learning curve. One sort of introduction that could potentially work well for teenagers would be to create a mod for an existing game that they already enjoy.
jarrett 15y ago
Like the students the OP describes, I too started programming hoping to build a game with as little effort as possible. (I wanted to build a massively multiplayer first person game. I know, I know. Hey, it was high school.) As soon as I hit topics like OpenGL and networking, I realized this was going to be harder than I thought. The only reason I stuck with it is because I found joy in each little success, like sending a single character over a TCP connection, or putting a border around a <div>. And these successes continue to make the struggle worthwhile. So this is totally anecdotal, but my personal experience conforms more with what Zed's saying. I think you won't enjoy programming unless you genuinely like the minute, seemingly boring details. Because those become your day-to-day consciousness far more than glamorous stuff like imagining new game mechanics and plotting out a storyline. (And that's assuming you're doing game development at all.)
ilovecomputers 15y ago
The article did make a very generalized statement that "nobody wants to learn programming, they want to learn how to make programs" when your curriculum is an exception. With your rhetoric, you were able to get people to learn by trotting on through concepts in their barest form. Fundamentally, you're both teaching by example and the code is simple, so that the results have a clear correlation to it. It seems to be an aesthetic choice as to whether you teach concepts outright and make it communicable with proper rhetoric or illustrate concepts by highlighting their use in a simple application. It's like two guitar instructors. One stresses etudes and practices alongside songs and another stresses songs alongside etudes and practices. I can't see either way hurting a student. Whatever the choice, you're packaging this information in a way that makes it digestible to those who want to learn how to program (either the way of rhetoric or application). I would like to say this though, at least you guys are not teaching Java by programming within the Eclipse IDE, which isn't ment for beginners.

by zedshaw 15y ago

angelbob 15y ago

Zed, you're awesome. With that said -- it's who you're teaching that lets you say this. Right now there are people who know they want to learn programming coming hell or high water, and you do a damn fine job teaching them. There are also a whole lot of people who might want to write apps, but do not want to go through the pain of learning programming. The audience of Scratch, from MIT, is the narrow end of this giant wedge of people. They have nowhere to go from there because nobody else does it that way. I miss the Apple II. It actually had a few on-ramps for people like that. Those on-ramps are pretty much dead now, though I have no idea why. The guy writing this article isn't aiming at your set of programmers. He's aiming at all the people who aren't programming but would love to be able to build apps of one kind or another. There are a lot of them, and even a lot who could, and who we do a terrible job of teaching.

zedshaw 15y ago
And no, I'm saying it's a huge myth that nobody wants to learn the "hard stuff". They do, you just have to teach it right. After that you just have people who aren't interested in programming at all and no amount of graphics, games, or cute cartoons is going to make them want to. You can't force or trick enlightenment on people. But more importantly, I have evidence to back my beliefs. This article has absolutely no evidence.
- Schultzy 15y ago
  I'm glad to be a piece of your evidence. I have college degrees in Entrepreneurship and Marketing and have been just a "non-tech" guy for too long. I got tired of not being able to build anything myself, so I'm working my way through your book right now. Of course I have a specific application in mind that I'd like to build, and perhaps this is evidence of my naivete, but it seems like if I were to just learn how to do that, I would be limiting my creativity. The difference between learning how to program only a specific type of application and learning to program in general seems like the difference between learning how to paint a bowl a fruit and studying the art of painting. What happens when you want to paint a bowl of fruit with a landscape behind it? Again, I may just be one fool, but it is not the allure of being able to program a specific application that I am after, it is the pain of being ignorant that I am trying to assuage.
  - stanleydrew 15y ago
    You present a false dichotomy. You don't have to choose to just learn how to program one kind of program or how to program generally. You can do both. And in my experience, having an idea and executing on it is a great way to start. You get instant gratification in learning one small subset of programming and you move on from there.
- AlSweigart 15y ago
  Hi Zed, I'm Al, the author of article. I'll admit the title is hyperbole. There are people who want to learn programming for the sake of programming, just like there are people who like learning math even though they don't see immediate practical applications. I teach programming to a tiny class of 10-12 year olds on Saturday mornings, and have taught a couple one-off classes at Stanford's Splash program to a classes of a dozen students. I've found that having an end-goal in mind of what they will create is a much better hook than just explaining what for loops are (or the idiosyncrasies of the languages are, which Python & Ruby are good about keeping to a minimum.) I don't think graphics and cute cartoons are needed to make programming engaging either. My book "Invent with Python" has games that use ascii text up until the last few chapters. There's a pretty low standard for games/programs that are cool enough to show off to other people, but nobody ever shows off code snippets. I think the best thing about "Learn Python the Hard Way" over a book like O'Reilly's "Learning Python" is that your book cuts it down to the bare concepts: "Type this. This should appear. This is what is happening." That's great compared to most computer books where there are paragraphs upon paragraphs that could be whittled down to a single sentence or cut out entirely. "Learn Python the Hard Way" is barely over 200 pages. That's much more digestible than some 600 page tome. I just think that many classes where the students aren't CS majors or necessarily dedicated to learning programming forget that it's not just the concepts that people want to learn but what they can make using those concepts. Small games and web apps are great for that. Like in Exercise 22 of your book says, "It’s important when you are doing a boring mindless memorization exercise like this to know why. It helps you focus on a goal and know the purpose of all your efforts."

keithpeter 15y ago

Hello Zed and all A few of us have even bought one of your books :-) My mature students taking basic maths courses in the UK will read the textbook and come back at me with questions that show they have confronted the material and put some time into it. The teenagers need a different approach, games, Web sites with interactive material, carefully chosen written material. Have you any age data about your participants? Perhaps the video courses?

zedshaw 15y ago
The age range for my courses is 11 to 65 so far, but I haven't been able to get statistics on the median. It's a touchy subject to ask folks their age, but my guess is the median is about 30, or that it's bimodal with 20 being one hump, and 30 being another. Another thing to keep in mind is that a computer is already interactive. The idea that you need "graphics" to get students interested is completely unfounded, and the only data comes from experiments from companies trying to sell graphical programming systems for education sales. Even then these studies were done in the 70's and 80's when many people just didn't have computers. In my experience I've found just making simple text adventure games is entertaining enough. Think about it: It's a game that is approachable by anyone, they are fun, they involve writing, their "graphics" are immediate, they don't require any geometry, and the output looks a lot like the program itself. That's why I teach them. They're easy but still fun. My experience says you don't need crazy amounts of sensory input to keep people interested, and in fact is just distracts them and frustrates them. Keep it simple, but make sure it has depth that they can discover.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  I would imagine the reason kids are likely to prefer graphics is because the games they play involve a lot of graphics so that's what they expect. I remember in the early 90s plugging away writing various text games in QBASIC then excitedly showing them to school friends who's reaction was mostly "too much reading, not enough guns. Let's play Doom instead". Of course this was somewhat disheartening and put me off programming for a few years. The closest thing that I've seen to a comprehensive game creation "kit" is Unity3d but that has a pretty steep learning curve. One sort of introduction that could potentially work well for teenagers would be to create a mod for an existing game that they already enjoy.

jarrett 15y ago

Like the students the OP describes, I too started programming hoping to build a game with as little effort as possible. (I wanted to build a massively multiplayer first person game. I know, I know. Hey, it was high school.) As soon as I hit topics like OpenGL and networking, I realized this was going to be harder than I thought. The only reason I stuck with it is because I found joy in each little success, like sending a single character over a TCP connection, or putting a border around a <div>. And these successes continue to make the struggle worthwhile. So this is totally anecdotal, but my personal experience conforms more with what Zed's saying. I think you won't enjoy programming unless you genuinely like the minute, seemingly boring details. Because those become your day-to-day consciousness far more than glamorous stuff like imagining new game mechanics and plotting out a storyline. (And that's assuming you're doing game development at all.)

ilovecomputers 15y ago

The article did make a very generalized statement that "nobody wants to learn programming, they want to learn how to make programs" when your curriculum is an exception. With your rhetoric, you were able to get people to learn by trotting on through concepts in their barest form. Fundamentally, you're both teaching by example and the code is simple, so that the results have a clear correlation to it. It seems to be an aesthetic choice as to whether you teach concepts outright and make it communicable with proper rhetoric or illustrate concepts by highlighting their use in a simple application. It's like two guitar instructors. One stresses etudes and practices alongside songs and another stresses songs alongside etudes and practices. I can't see either way hurting a student. Whatever the choice, you're packaging this information in a way that makes it digestible to those who want to learn how to program (either the way of rhetoric or application). I would like to say this though, at least you guys are not teaching Java by programming within the Eclipse IDE, which isn't ment for beginners.