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See, what I hate about those kinds of pamphlets is they're written by established programmers with an audience that they half-expect to be partially full of the

See, what I hate about those kinds of pamphlets is they're written by established programmers with an audience that they half-expect to be partially full of their peers. Therefore they are always careful not to sidestep into more dodgy advice out of fear of getting called out for preaching out bad practices. Issue is, if you were to inspect how they, the author themselves, someone who has personally and successfully learned programming, learned their skills at the beginning of their life, it would probably be 1) questionable ways to learn, and 2) nothing like what they are preaching. I like reading pamphlets and this one makes sense, but what I'd like even more would be to look at people who succeeded and see what worked, then people who failed and see what didn't.

hcs 3y ago
This is me projecting from my own thoughts on designing new ways to learn programming, which doesn't quite match with Bret Victor's approach but might be similar enough: The way that many programmers came up is still available [1], and it is easier than ever to self-teach if you come at it with a similar set of faculties and obsessions and can just keep hacking at things until you understand it. The search for something new is to try to extend this to people who can't or won't follow that approach, for whatever reasons. Essays like this are trying to point out what he thinks those reasons are and how to build tools around them. [1] I'm aware counterarguments to this, there's an ever-increasing gulf between popular computer entertainment and something a kid (or any single person) can do, and it's a lot more complicated to program even basic interactive things due to how much more complicated and protected computers are now. Edit: To expand on [1]: And there are projects, e.g. Processing.js, Scratch, Media Computation, OLPC, Raspberry Pi, and surely newer ones since I last followed the literature, that come at different angles of that problem. Edit2: A large part of my own approach is to try making games where the player discovers what I find fascinating about programmable machines, so I can see what you're saying. But I am repelled when I approach a design that you need to already be a programmer to appreciate.

hcs 3y ago

This is me projecting from my own thoughts on designing new ways to learn programming, which doesn't quite match with Bret Victor's approach but might be similar enough: The way that many programmers came up is still available [1], and it is easier than ever to self-teach if you come at it with a similar set of faculties and obsessions and can just keep hacking at things until you understand it. The search for something new is to try to extend this to people who can't or won't follow that approach, for whatever reasons. Essays like this are trying to point out what he thinks those reasons are and how to build tools around them. [1] I'm aware counterarguments to this, there's an ever-increasing gulf between popular computer entertainment and something a kid (or any single person) can do, and it's a lot more complicated to program even basic interactive things due to how much more complicated and protected computers are now. Edit: To expand on [1]: And there are projects, e.g. Processing.js, Scratch, Media Computation, OLPC, Raspberry Pi, and surely newer ones since I last followed the literature, that come at different angles of that problem. Edit2: A large part of my own approach is to try making games where the player discovers what I find fascinating about programmable machines, so I can see what you're saying. But I am repelled when I approach a design that you need to already be a programmer to appreciate.