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I have to disagree ... there are a lot of folks who don't learn well being thrown in at the deep end of "mess around until you understand it", and for whom a Br

I have to disagree ... there are a lot of folks who don't learn well being thrown in at the deep end of "mess around until you understand it", and for whom a Bretian visualization of data would be useful over and over again (especially for bugfinding). And what data needs to be visualized is different for different people; e.g., I can easily visualize most regex, but a lot of people love tools like Rubular because they can't. But I have a lot of trouble intuitively understanding functions like the graphical ones in Bret's examples. As to "dumbing it down", I think programming can definitely have mass appeal, but there's a lot of "I had to learn closures uphill in the snow both ways" going on among seasoned programmers -- in the same way that current medical doctors often valorize their hours and hours of being on call as residents. A trial by fire may seem useful but in the end you just get a lot of burned people. But unlike MDs, there's no protective guild for programmers ...

zmitri 14y ago
I agree, there are a lot of people who don't learn that well like that. Visual programming makes it a bit more approachable but whether or not it helps learn beyond the first couple lessons (or is overkill) -- I'm not sure. With a lot of these early concepts I feel like just getting one or two reference points can start a snowball effect. Eg. Tell a philosophy student that object orientation is like Plato's Theory of Forms. From personal experience however I still would argue that just building something is the surest way to go because it requires you to follow through. After about 2 years of programming full time, I started to develop a sense of why and when things would go wrong up and down the stack, and I don't really think it's something you can teach. It's something you get from loads of accumulated practice -- eg. Oh that's how indices work in Oracle vs MySQL, dynamic proxies on Groovy methods don't work when called from Java, I just built this but now I see I can refactor and save tons of code next time, what are kwargs in python, etc. I've tested out little one offs like try mongodb, try redis, or interactive js tutorials, but I forget what I've just learned until I need to build something on my own.
alid 14y ago
As a newbie/wannabe programmer this completely resonates with me. It's not so much 'dumbing down' as about beginning with the end in mind and providing frameworks of thinking - it’s a lot easier to put the pieces of a puzzle together when you know what the picture is before you start.

zmitri 14y ago

I agree, there are a lot of people who don't learn that well like that. Visual programming makes it a bit more approachable but whether or not it helps learn beyond the first couple lessons (or is overkill) -- I'm not sure. With a lot of these early concepts I feel like just getting one or two reference points can start a snowball effect. Eg. Tell a philosophy student that object orientation is like Plato's Theory of Forms. From personal experience however I still would argue that just building something is the surest way to go because it requires you to follow through. After about 2 years of programming full time, I started to develop a sense of why and when things would go wrong up and down the stack, and I don't really think it's something you can teach. It's something you get from loads of accumulated practice -- eg. Oh that's how indices work in Oracle vs MySQL, dynamic proxies on Groovy methods don't work when called from Java, I just built this but now I see I can refactor and save tons of code next time, what are kwargs in python, etc. I've tested out little one offs like try mongodb, try redis, or interactive js tutorials, but I forget what I've just learned until I need to build something on my own.

alid 14y ago

As a newbie/wannabe programmer this completely resonates with me. It's not so much 'dumbing down' as about beginning with the end in mind and providing frameworks of thinking - it’s a lot easier to put the pieces of a puzzle together when you know what the picture is before you start.