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Reminds me of a comment I made a while back reflecting on past teaching experience. Programming is easy to teach, provided you have a fairly friendly context t
by Bjorkbat 2y ago
Reminds me of a comment I made a while back reflecting on past teaching experience. Programming is easy to teach, provided you have a fairly friendly context to teach under. Teaching programming in the context of p5js and by making a bunch of simple visual / interactive "toys" is easy.
It gets complicated when you have to build websites and apps to actually solve some kind of business / consumer need, and I would argue it isn't even the programming aspect that makes it complicated. Rather, it's the fact that the thing you're building is built atop a layer of dependencies that you don't really know anything about, who in turn have their own layer of dependencies. To use these dependencies effectively, you need to know about some of the concepts embodied within them, such as a render lifecycle if we're talking about some kind of frontend js framework, knowledge that isn't precisely "programming knowledge".
And I as I mentioned before, this is why I think I'm not too worried about LLMs getting good at programming.
- drewcoo 2y agoTeaching in those "hard" contexts doesn't seem more difficult than mentoring/managing multiple junior engineers, possibly of several skill levels. Actually, teaching tabula rasa students might well be easier than teaching people to un-learn whatever made them successful with their first languages or frameworks. We all have lots to unlearn before we figure out what we should learn.