2 ms·

> Nobody is born knowing how to program I think we can agree that nobody is born with the language needed to express a program. But can we equate that to havin

> Nobody is born knowing how to program I think we can agree that nobody is born with the language needed to express a program. But can we equate that to having no innate sense of how to program in the abstract? One of the newer programming languages on the scene, GPT, has shown that many people who didn't think they could program are suddenly able to thanks to a syntax that is nearly identical to languages used for regular social communication. It seems people could program all along, they just lacked a way to express it. I seems fair to say that a "cloud-native real time chat client" also requires understanding a lot of implementation details that have been built up over decades. Those particular systems are no doubt something that needs to be learned to work with. But that's really moving beyond programming in and of itself. In a similar vein, are people born able to conceive of a story? I think we can agree that nobody is born with the natural language necessary to express it to others, but if you were raised by wolves in the forest would you still have some semblance of a story floating around in your mind? Understandably we lack the tools needed to give a definitive answer, but the best evidence suggests yes. So, why not programming?

jerf 3y ago
I suspect you have not spent any time with a child lately in a teaching context, if ever. Yes, I'm perfectly comfortable saying people have no innate sense of programming, even if I simply discard babies and toddlers (which is a pretty large concession to be making). Some pick it up more easily than others but nobody is simply born with it. Unsurprisingly (for an HN poster), I'm on the higher end of talent myself in general, but I still remember when I realized programs don't need line numbers, how closures work, etc. Pointers was no big deal to me but I still wasn't born knowing about them, and while pointers to pointers posed no conceptual difficulty in what they are in some brute sense, grokking what could be done with them was a process. I don't think even Knuth learned what pointers are and immediately would have derived the Dancing Links algorithm without conscious thought.

jerf 3y ago

I suspect you have not spent any time with a child lately in a teaching context, if ever. Yes, I'm perfectly comfortable saying people have no innate sense of programming, even if I simply discard babies and toddlers (which is a pretty large concession to be making). Some pick it up more easily than others but nobody is simply born with it. Unsurprisingly (for an HN poster), I'm on the higher end of talent myself in general, but I still remember when I realized programs don't need line numbers, how closures work, etc. Pointers was no big deal to me but I still wasn't born knowing about them, and while pointers to pointers posed no conceptual difficulty in what they are in some brute sense, grokking what could be done with them was a process. I don't think even Knuth learned what pointers are and immediately would have derived the Dancing Links algorithm without conscious thought.