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I say this as humbly as possible. I've taught a few classes to newbies for work, and yes, I'm frustrated with how fast the powers that be expect classes to be

I say this as humbly as possible. I've taught a few classes to newbies for work, and yes, I'm frustrated with how fast the powers that be expect classes to be taught. But one also has to accept how slowly you have to go to teach new material to newbies. I've gotten unsolicited feedback from students thanking me, and one even sent me an email saying I inspired him to learn more, which was really touching. I've also received the "my god, you do it so fast!" comment. So with all due respect reading that post, that's not a symptom of "two cultures" per se, its a symptom of bad teaching, and a complete miss-match of material/audience. In what possible universe is presenting to a bunch of librarians unix/grep/git/latex/python considered sane? Were the presenters really that mind-blind? Half of those things are debate-ably not even programming, and all of them should be separate subjects. There is little/no reason to teach UNIX/regular-expressions/git/latex to someone who is learning to program in python, assuming the course is made up of non-programmers and the goal is to introduce programming. Its going to take them months/years before they're even at a stage where they vaguely have a reason to use those tools rather than the tools at hand, and I'm sorry but most of them are not going to stick with it that long. Do you know how long it takes to get assignment/arrays/loops/functions/variables/types/logic all working together? We're talking YEARS! We all forget about it the same way we forget about how hard it is to speak our native tongues, but you might as well fly into a room of native Japanese people reading shakespeare for the lecture. Non-programmers do not understand "AND" or "OR". And you're worried about unix/collaboration tools when they're going to struggle to write a 10 line program by themselves if they're the gifted ones? If you want to inspire someone to learn to program (and I'm on the fence as to whether its really possible to do so if someone isn't inclined to hack things themselves anyway), then present them a real world task from their work/life they couldn't solve with their current tools. Then you need to show them how to solve it with programming, and only with the amount of programming learn-able (that's how much they can learn, not how much you can present) in the length of the course, so they could do it themselves without you present. If you cannot do this, either the kind of people who program are likely going to discover such things by themselves, or you're probably wasting your time, because you can bet that they're just going through the motions at their keyboards and their eyes glazed over from the moment you said "statement/expression/function/assignment/Boolean/variable". All your words do not mean anything to normal people!!! /end rant.

Crito 13y ago
> "In what possible universe is presenting to a bunch of librarians unix/grep/git/latex/python considered sane?" I could see a case for teaching them latex, if only so that they were familiar with bibtex citations. I learned recently that my alma mater combined their CS department and their library science department into some sort of conglomerate department. I can't say I agree with that decision (particularly in that case, I perceive it as a continuation of a negative trend in advertising, presentation, and prioritization at that university... but that is a separate topic) but the notion that librarians need computer skills above and beyond what the standard modern professional needs is not unheard of.
- ACow_Adonis 13y ago
  I was actually going to say, i can understand a LaTeX course maybe for librarians :P But i do think it should be a separate course, and you need to be able to explain to them why this is a great thing, and in addition to whatever they're doing at the moment. Plus, it needs to be great enough to overcome any network/lock in effects of "but everyone else does it this way"...(and good luck with that...because that's often the reason we do sub-optimal things in programming culture). You've got to do that and replace what they're doing right now, or helps them solve a problem in and of itself that was previously unsolvable. Its not that I'm against teaching them such things, its just that it has to be in an environment of suitable context, and at a level expected of not only a beginner, but of a beginner who has never done any programming. And far be it from me to say so, but maybe...just maybe...there's a reason librarians aren't programmers and are using the tools they have available to them. Maybe its the programmers who are in the wrong. I was shocked when i got into the workforce and discovered that everyone was doing all sorts of IT/admin stuff manually, and thought "if only everyone could program, think of all the efficiency gains!". Now, I'm realizing its a bit more complicated than that...
pgbovine 13y ago
If you want to inspire someone to learn to program (and I'm on the fence as to whether its really possible to do so if someone isn't inclined to hack things themselves anyway), then present them a real world task from their work/life they couldn't solve with their current tools. That's exactly the point of these workshops -- to teach librarians, research assistants, scientists, and other sorts of professionals to become more productive via programming. Real-world tasks for them often involve knowing about and manipulating the filesystem (hence command-line craziness), coordination and typesetting (hence Git / LaTeX), and data analysis and visualization (hence Python/JS/d3/etc.). And these folks were motivated to learn to hopefully help their careers. The teachers also had the best possible attitude and patience that I had seen, and yet still there was this schism, which I wrote about.

Crito 13y ago

> "In what possible universe is presenting to a bunch of librarians unix/grep/git/latex/python considered sane?" I could see a case for teaching them latex, if only so that they were familiar with bibtex citations. I learned recently that my alma mater combined their CS department and their library science department into some sort of conglomerate department. I can't say I agree with that decision (particularly in that case, I perceive it as a continuation of a negative trend in advertising, presentation, and prioritization at that university... but that is a separate topic) but the notion that librarians need computer skills above and beyond what the standard modern professional needs is not unheard of.

ACow_Adonis 13y ago
I was actually going to say, i can understand a LaTeX course maybe for librarians :P But i do think it should be a separate course, and you need to be able to explain to them why this is a great thing, and in addition to whatever they're doing at the moment. Plus, it needs to be great enough to overcome any network/lock in effects of "but everyone else does it this way"...(and good luck with that...because that's often the reason we do sub-optimal things in programming culture). You've got to do that and replace what they're doing right now, or helps them solve a problem in and of itself that was previously unsolvable. Its not that I'm against teaching them such things, its just that it has to be in an environment of suitable context, and at a level expected of not only a beginner, but of a beginner who has never done any programming. And far be it from me to say so, but maybe...just maybe...there's a reason librarians aren't programmers and are using the tools they have available to them. Maybe its the programmers who are in the wrong. I was shocked when i got into the workforce and discovered that everyone was doing all sorts of IT/admin stuff manually, and thought "if only everyone could program, think of all the efficiency gains!". Now, I'm realizing its a bit more complicated than that...

pgbovine 13y ago

If you want to inspire someone to learn to program (and I'm on the fence as to whether its really possible to do so if someone isn't inclined to hack things themselves anyway), then present them a real world task from their work/life they couldn't solve with their current tools. That's exactly the point of these workshops -- to teach librarians, research assistants, scientists, and other sorts of professionals to become more productive via programming. Real-world tasks for them often involve knowing about and manipulating the filesystem (hence command-line craziness), coordination and typesetting (hence Git / LaTeX), and data analysis and visualization (hence Python/JS/d3/etc.). And these folks were motivated to learn to hopefully help their careers. The teachers also had the best possible attitude and patience that I had seen, and yet still there was this schism, which I wrote about.