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Yes, you need foundations to build a knowledge temple, but that was not my question. I am simply wondering how the average HN reader, with average programming
by nmc 13y ago
Yes, you need foundations to build a knowledge temple, but that was not my question.
I am simply wondering how the average HN reader, with average programming abilities and knowledge, would feel about an article of this level.
- arethuza 13y agoI don't know about the "average HN reader" I would have thought that anyone with an undergraduate CS degree should be reasonably happy with that article.
- ColinWright 13y agoBut what we've seen many times is that many programmers do not have an undergrad CS degree. More, many programmers claim that formal education is a complete waste of time, and that they can quite happily program capably and competently without having gone to college or university. Some of them will have been autodidacts who have taught themselves this sort of thing already. Some will be autodidacts who have enough foundations to be ready to understand this. But some will not. Some will have picked things up here and there and become useful programmers, but find this sort of thing hard going and mind-blowing. The question was to wonder what proportion of HN readers fall in each category.
- arethuza 13y agoI guess doing a survey here in HN is probably the only way of measuring that. As for CS graduates, I suspect that even those who had a course in that area might not actually be that interested - I was fascinated by lambda calculus, combinators and implementations of functional languages so the article was probably more interesting for me than most.