I don't really see how the proposed way of teaching how to code is any better... I do like the idea of use-case based teaching.
Have the student choose what kind of thing they're trying to accomplish, then structure the class dynamically based on the needs of their choices, or something like that
IMO coding should be taught like a trade. Take woodworking for example. Sure you spend some time learning to make straight cuts etc, but you quickly move to building thing with a lot of feedback.
When I was in school (it's been a while), we built super boring things that nobody cared about as our assignments. Various inventory systems, which you have to sort/search.
That was a big challenge of mine in school. I wasn't that interested in the assignments, because I was building boring stuff that didn't really solve problems, let alone ones I cared about.
I am pretty prolific in my career, and I'm not even what you would call a hardcore dev. Which brings me to my next gripe with CS curriculum: It is geared towards training hardcore devs and not any other type of engineer.
The types of coders we should have some sort of curriculum for, which we to this day mostly do not:
-SRE's
-Ops people
-Support people
-PM's
-Accountants/General finance
-DBA's
-SysAdmins
-Network engineers
-Cloud engineers
I partially agree, but how isn't the usual CS curriculum relevant for Sysadmins, DBAs, network engineers and the like?
What CS curriculum doesn't include networks, relational theory, hardware architecture, os architecture? How can anybody in those roles be successful without at least informally understanding the rudiments of big-O notation or without having some light scripting skills?
Certainly CS curricula could be improved, but a good one doesn't do too bad of a job at preparing you for technical roles IMO.
My inclusion of them on the list is from just 2 data points:
Those sorts of classes were available when I was in school, but it was not a whole track, it was 1 class each.
Second data point: These are the types of roles I meet in the wild who would benefit from coding, and they usually cannot (or can do some very light scripting).
I cannot explain it exactly. They just usually are missing that skill.
In the US, the kind of programming most immediately useful for sysadmins and DBAs, and other operations fields, are, or were, typically present in community colleges and technical colleges, not university programs (where CS dominates, or "programming for engineers/statistics" basic classes). At least that was the case 10+ years ago, have they stopped teaching those classes and providing certifications/associates degrees appropriate to those fields?
I have opinions™, but mostly agree with this article. Most intro coding classes and course materials read more like a glossary than a lesson. This contributes (rather directly) to the failure to retain a diverse student base in intro CS program. We've gotten a lot better at recruiting CS students from underrepresented groups (women and BIPOC chiefly), but numbers drop off quickly[1].
Studies in math education have shown that the way material is presented/courses are run has a huge impact on reducing disparities[2]. This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't. Students arrive in intro CS courses, are sat next to students who have been coding since they were 10, and are rightfully intimidated even though they could succeed in the course.
While I was at the University of Michigan, I helped a professor develop "Joy of Coding," a mini-course for high school students that focuses on sparking desire ("joy") rather than teaching CS first principles[3]. By the end of the first lesson, students are manipulating images with code – a real "WOW!" moment. It's built on Pathbird, a platform that I built (in conjunction with UMich faculty) to run more engaging and accessible courses in computer science and computational subjects. (Shameless plug: if you're interested in Pathbird, or even just to chat, drop me a line at travis@pathbird.com).
Meanwhile my sister's first programming course at university involved making a game using an existing bespoke framework. It mostly involved adding graphics and a few methods & some properties to objects (which already had physics etc. implemented) in an otherwise more or less done project base. I don't know about retaining or intimidation but I feel like it was way too much "just fill in the gaps, look you have a character on the screen now" and that they really failed to teach the basics of programming and I got the vibe that students finished the course not really having any clue how the whole thing works at all. The next course was object oriented programming at the deep end.
I feel like she's still struggling with the basics and doesn't have much self confidence at all. And she's not dumb.
1. Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee" and quit shopping in the Pink Aisle at the toy store and reinforcing that culture. Buy your kids Lego and Raspberry Pi circuit kits and see what happens.
2. CS is part coding, part science of algorithms, and part software engineering. We have to quit intertwingling all terms into the catchall "CS" bucket because sometimes "how to run excel" gets thrown in there too. Maybe best to drop the term altogether and use more descriptive names for each study.
> 1. Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee" and quit shopping in the Pink Aisle at the toy store and reinforcing that culture. Buy your kids Lego and Raspberry Pi circuit kits and see what happens.
Girls in STEM =/= Girls becoming professional programmers.
There are plenty of girls in STEM fields such as medicine, biology, geology, physics, Math, civil engineering...
The fact that not a lot of them want to be forced to sit before a computer 10 hours a day for the rest of their lives certainly isn't an issue if you asks me...
Sitting at a computer for 10 hours a day isn't a gendered thing.
There is nothing about computer science or programming that is gender specific. It, ideally, should sit around 50-50, ±5%. So yes, it is a problem that it so heavily skews male.
As to why, it's multi-faceted cultural issue, with how our society treats boys and girls starting from birth. In other words, a pipeline issue.
I never said or implied that programming was sexed, I told the parent that just because they are fewer female developers doesn't mean the sex imbalance is the same or even skewed heavily toward males in every STEM discipline.
> Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee"
To me, the very existence of "Girls in STEM" groups is sending a weird message to girls (and I’m apparently not the only one to think that). Something along the lines of “sure you can do STEM, you’re just not good enough to do it the regular way so we created a group just for you”.
Honestly that’s the message a lot of diversity initiatives end up sending.
couldn't agree more - have STEM groups and encourage everyone that wants in, to join, but don't make them sit in the 'special class' separate from everyone else.
True to some degree, but I think it does help girls get involved in areas where boys are dominant. In high school the comments from boys towards girls interested in such pursuits can deter them. Having a space free of that, at least until they've developed the motivation to continue, is important.
As a high school CS teacher, I've seen how boys can be towards girls interested in coding.
All of this swings both ways, of course, and men are deterred from positions like elementary school teacher, nursing, and secretary roles. Gender being attached to jobs is just dumb in general, and keeps a lot of capable people from doing what they'd love.
> As a high school CS teacher, I've seen how boys can be towards girls interested in coding.
I'm surprised. I was expecting the opposite (boys wanting more girls in the classroom!).
> All of this swings both ways, of course, and men are deterred from positions like elementary school teacher, nursing, and secretary roles.
It's interesting that there's an acknowledgement that we need more male nurses (from healthcare professionals) and male elementary school teachers (from experts in the field) and yet there are zero initiatives to do so.
By that I mean money being spent toward that goal. The same way there's a will to have more "diversity" in medicine... mainly so that people of color can go serve "their people" in underserved areas (read: not very attractive or lucrative).
But in computing we’re spending a fortune and investing time to essentially… commoditize ourselves.
> I'm surprised. I was expecting the opposite (boys wanting more girls in the classroom!).
I think they probably want to be around girls, but most boys are social morons at that age. There is also the element of them being able to get in cheap shots to impress their friends. They don't really think of the consequences.
> It's interesting that there's an acknowledgement that we need more male nurses (from healthcare professionals) and male elementary school teachers (from experts in the field) and yet there are zero initiatives to do so.
Agreed, especially on the school front, as I think it's important for kids in schools to have a range of influences during their early years.
RE: 2: I think I agree. There are lots of "CS" programs targeted towards high-school students which I have mixed feelings about. The goal shouldn't be to turn every student that walks through the door into a SWE (there's somewhat of a conflict of interest here considering most programs are sponsored by big tech companies who are desperate for talent – Microsoft does a lot in this space). Instead, I think it should serve a few roles: expose students to new opportunities (learn if you do want to be a SWE); give students the skills to understand that computers and algorithms are not magic (important from a public awareness perspective); and also to teach enough "deep" technical skills to prepare them for a world dominated by software (e.g., learning how to query databases, write small automations, etc.).
But I think most important is that intro courses need to serve as jumping off points (i.e., they should be INTRO courses). Give students a taste and let them decide if they like it and want to take another bite.
Do you know of any comparative studies with other countries? Or is this a predominately US/Canada issue?
For example, do BIPOC students in Botswana drop out at similar rates? Do non-BIPOC students in Taiwan experience similar drop out rates? What are the classes and course materials like in these countries in comparison to the US/Canada?
What about drop out numbers from international students? For example, do Polish women studying CS at American universities drop out at the same rate as American women? For those who do drop out, do they drop out for the same reasons?
If we want to get to the root of the problem we need both more breadth and more depth in our understanding. Too often we stop at the men/women (in America) or BIPOC/non-BIPOC (in America) divides, and then provide generalized solutions which have very limit impact.
I can speak as someone who has taught CS in high school in a few different East Asian countries, including Taiwan. The bias exists, but is less pronounced than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Boys will make remarks, but if you nip it quickly at the start then it's generally ok.
I teach all four years in high school and each year I get more females rolling up. My recent graduating classes have had more females, but still only 20% or so, but my entry level classes now are 50/50.
Oddly, every female I've had who takes the higher level CS classes has graduated with the highest mark you can get on the exit exams. They routinely destroy the boys on any test and with regard to programming skills. Sadly, some of those who take it at the lower level are pushed by their parents to take other classes at higher levels in preparation for university admission. Parents sometimes carry that bias that females should not be engineers.
> This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't.
Just be aware that this is not everyones experience.
Many places boys are held back and girls are pushed forward.
And then afterwards boys gets told they are somehow "privileged" and would never be were they are if it wasn't for "male privilege".
Obviously this goes both ways, but there is at least some focus on it when it hurts girls.
If you try to mention the problems young innocent boys have, be prepared to get laughed out.
This is a pseudonymous account and I am not willing to change that.
I will try without giving anything away, but you will need to help me here:
- Do you really think some people here haven't grown up with feminist teachers who took it way too far?
- How many times have you heard anything about "Girls who code" vs "Boys who code"?
- If you are actually interested and ready to see something ugly, just go back and try to read some "mens day" discussion on Twitter or I think even on HN too.
I've tried to be active in those days in a positive way. Last year I gave up. Any mention of today being mens day on company chat is immediately laughed off with something along the lines of "and so is 363 other days".
Meanwhile men die younger, have higher incarceration rates, more suicides, and gets less education.
And also the few times there is discussion it is often redirected to "how men are suffering from toxic masculinity" which is probably true but only a small problem.
Yes, I remember back in the day the girls would always try to come into the computer lab to play video games. My friends and I were always like, "GET OUT! WE HATE WOMEN!" Then they left. The girls wanted to learn how to code so badly, but we wouldn't let them. My friends and I were getting lots of sexual attention from women, but we thought that was boring, and preferred to spend our time alone on computers. The girls were having sex, but they thought it was boring, and wanted to learn to code instead, but my friends and I physically prevented them from entering the computer lab, using our strong muscles. My friends and I all had zero sex drive, and if we had any attention from the opposite sex we would have rejected it and continued to spend all our time on computers.
It's a parody of the ridiculous notion that geeky men try to keep women out of their hobbies. Reality is that geeky men are practically gagging for women to share their interests.
It's well documented that the behavior of geeky men discourages women who are interested in such hobbies and fields, so I'm not sure that it is entirely ridiculous for some people to assume that is intentional.
I at least try to never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence. Geeks are not known for their social skills. Their reclusiveness and cliquishness limits their ability to learn social skills from their more skilled peers, instead trying to learn from each other, like the blind leading the blind. Combine that with hormones and even more limited experience dealing with women as people and you get them either trying to one-up each other in some of the sort of dick measuring contests they use as social dominance displays or using patronizing gestures to treat women as if they were children.
Interesting that you felt the need to sexualize the girls who were interested in computers.
They are people, not objects for your pleasure. If your comment even remotely reflects your attitude towards them, then you might as well have been telling them "GET OUT! WE HATE WOMEN!".
Do you think that maybe if you treated them like people and welcomed them to the group with patient explanations, expecting nothing, they might have hung around?
> We've gotten a lot better at recruiting CS students from underrepresented groups (women and BIPOC chiefly), but numbers drop off quickly
Are you really better at it if you can’t retain them in the long run?
The stats you shared are interesting, but to me it seems to highlight that students are getting “weeded out” at the beginning of the course. I would be curious to attempt a correlation with High school GPA and SAT scores. Because, if lower performing students leave, regardless of gender or race, that’s to be expected. But if overachieving students of color leave and their (white or asian) peers with lower grades don’t, now that’s an interesting issue.
> Students arrive in intro CS courses, are sat next to students who have been coding since they were 10, and are rightfully intimidated even though they could succeed in the course.
I would argue the solution here is to have different “levels” of intro courses. Because the converse is also true; students that are coming in with a decade of coding and who already had an introduction to programming might assume they will be able to “coast out” courses and then suddenly realize they are falling behind their peers. And then drop out.
> This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't.
It's not my experience.
When I was a kid CS/IT didn't exist where I lived.
I was a math geek who loved to occupy himself with solving problems which are useless in real life and I was actively discouraged from it by parents, teachers and even bullied by peers.
I still liked it but I tried not to speak about with anyone except some closest friends who accepted my weirdness.
From my perspective it seemed that compared to boys the girls need more acceptance are less likely to pursue something they like if they are actively discouraged from it.
"<x> is broken" -- clickbait title. His approach is fine, I like it. Let him offer it to paying customers, and see how they like it.
There are many different approaches to teaching out in the world, some free and some not. There are code boot camps, which survive only if they work -- since they only last 12-20 weeks, bad feedback would sink them pretty fast (unlike 4-year colleges, where the worthlessness of your degree doesn't become apparent until years later).
When I was in junior high school in the 90s in my computer science class we learned Pascal by programming our own Light Cycles clone. Everything we learned was in service of making our game work. And we each came up with different solutions to accomplish the same things, and learned from each other.
This article seems to imply this isn't how things are done now, but surely they still are by most?
Similar for me. Even though I had already been programming on my own, my first school-led programming classes were with done with Logo, then Apple Basic, then Pascal, always used to build specific and simple programs. I never had an intro class start with types.
Article seems to be complaining about the typical chapter layout for a reference book on a given programming language. Such books aren't intended to teach coding. The intended audience is those who already understand how to code, in a different language.
Basically, every YT tutorial is exactly like the Chapters listed. Corey to Sentdex, or pick your favorite "How to code" book from Amazon. It is quite rare to find a book that the article describes (use-case based learning). Can you share a few if you know?
The Head First series of books. They are available for multiple programming languages and use the same set of use cases across them all. The books are even written with techniques to suggest to the brain it should remember this information.
I have always struggled with how to advise my friends & family on this path of learning. It seems like everyone wants to be a WFH developer these days, but I don't know how to enable them to succeed on that path. "Go build something you want to build!" is something I keep reiterating (as does this article). But most don't seem to be interested in that for whatever reason (presumably because its fucking hard).
Maybe I should just leave it at that - I am getting to a point where if someone doesn't have the willpower to go burn a whole weekend on a pile of bullshit that won't even compile (i.e. because they really want to solve some problem), then maybe they won't have the necessary pain tolerance required to truly master the skillset.
I've attempted to teach multiple family members/friends over the years "how to code", and they give up almost immediately. They "just don't get it", and I'd argue one needs to seriously find enjoyment in building things, and knowing how long things can take, to get started.
People want to learn the guitar|piano|violin, until they realize the amount of work it takes.
People want to get fit and jacked, until they realize the amount of work it takes.
People want to be a lawyer/doctor/engineer, until they realize the amount of work it takes.
Or they realize that they just don't really like it.
Programming isn't any different. One needs a particular mindset, and a level of patience to deal with debugging. It's not for everyone, and that's fine.
Only caveat is, and this is where I feel bad, if the person hasn't learned something new in a very long time, they forget what it feels like to change, or even become convinced that they can't. It can be hard to convince someone that no, you don't need to have aptitude or be any good at it after a few days, weeks, even months. You just need to keep doing it. As long as the goal is realistic, you'll succeed. Whether you are more or less "talented" than someone else affects the timeline (a little) but you are going to the same place (again, realistic goals).
I know it's a pithy saying, but is it true? People tend to report the actual lifting of the weights as pretty pleasurable. It's the whole supporting lifestyle grind of consistently making it to the gym, only and always eating food whose ingredients you have weighed, etc. where you lose most people.
It's a pithy saying. It's basically shorthand for: "nobody wants to put in the work and adjust their lifestyle to achieve that goal of being ripped". But I wouldn't say doing 3x or 5x sets of lifting heavy weights ever is "fun"- you just get used to it.
As part of the right routine and exercises, lifting weights can be very pleasant. Personally, I love doing a good set of dumbbell rows.
What keeps me (and I think a lot of people) from getting ripped is the sheer consistency needed. Doing anything that isn't strictly necessary for 1-2 hours 5-6 days per week every week for years is extremely difficult imo. I get knocked off course very easily, sometimes for months at a time, and I have yet to find a solution for this.
Applies to learning foreign languages too. I've spoken to many people that want to "learn Spanish" without having a clue that it's a huge grind to get to basic competency.
I'm not trying to level this against your friends and family, just an observation that I've been meaning to share, spurred by "just don't get it":
When I was in community college I had to take "Critical Thinking" as a pre-req for Symbolic Logic.
We spent the first 1/3 of the class, 8 weeks, analyzing truth statements, basically and, or and not. I was bored to tears, but attendance was mandatory, so I got to see how people absolutely struggled with this, and "just didn't get it". The average score on the mid-term covering that was a low D after 8 weeks of (excruciating for me) examples. I finished in <15 minutes and got 100%.
When you are in a bubble of people who work in engineering fields, especially in tech where logic is fundamental, I think it's easy to think that logic comes naturally to everybody, but it's far from ubiquitous and reading on here it sometimes feels like some people just don't realize this, especially those deep in tech.
Sometimes it's hard for engineers. In college, I majored in Computer Science, and for an elective, I took Electronics for non-EE majors. The first half of the course was analog electronics which I struggled with, but everyone else appeared to be following along fine. It was the second half of the class, with digital electronics, where things flipped. Students would struggle with "5V is a 1? 5V isn't 1V! What's going on?" while for me it was, "yeah, yeah, I know this already ... "
You can show people the door, but they have to walk through it. I learned programming, and a bunch of other stuff later in life (now 39). They all have the same process - you decide you want to do it, and you start doing it. You will absolutely fail hard and regularly at it. You'll pick the wrong course or book or language or whatever, but that's all part of the process. If people see you doing the work and are able, they'll help you out (ideally, not IME).
In a way its kind of nice to get started with something new, because you don't need a plan at first. You just start kind of doing it, and then when you take breaks, you figure out the plan. Its amazing how quickly you can pick things up once you get into the habit of doing it very regularly. That initial hump is always, ALWAYS a huge pain, but there's no escaping it. Failing and flailing for that initial period is how you learn, not how you fail.
I have never met a programmer I respected skill-wise that wouldn't randomly spend a weekend locked in a room solving an esoteric problem they felt they had to solve (for no reason). Over the Christmas holidays everyone at my company writes PoCs or hobby projects, being glad to have some free time away from paid programming in order to enjoy recreational programming.
What I'm trying to get at is software engineering is an easy career if you're literally obsessed with it, and most software engineers are, or at least were at some point (it goes in cycles).
If you're not gonna do that, you simply can't assimilate the huge amount of knowledge needed to truly excel in even one facet of programming.
When non-tech folks ask me how to learn programming because they want "jump on the money train", I ask them if they ever take the initiative to solve a problem with programming. You don't have to work in tech to do this. For example:
Work in an office writing documents and making spreadsheets? Have you ever simplified your job by writing a Word or Excel Macro?
Own a smart TV? Have you dug into its features until you know them backwards and forwards and can program it to (metaphorically) sing and dance on command?
Have you connected multiple things in your house together so you can control them from your phone, just because you could?
These are all examples of taking the initiative AND having the curiosity to dig into technical problems, and implement solutions. If you are like this, you will likely do well in tech and really enjoy it. If you DON'T have the tendency to do these sorts of things, you are probably going to have a bad time.
> learn programming because they want "jump on the money train"
I think this is the best predictor of poor outcome in the field. The devs I've seen that chose the field for the money typically didn't last long and did everything they could to get into a non-technical position (often management). And then, unsurprisingly, fared poorly there as well.
I often see STEM pitched as a way to make money... And really the only people making money out of it are the institution cashing the first-year tuitions checks before they drop out. And that’s not even touching the predatory ISA that bootcamps offer…
Jm2c but I'm a great developer (I think) but I'm a terrible tech consumer. I have issues with smartphones most of my peers do not and I hate doing smart things at home.
I would also suggest that it's a matter of having an engineeristis attitude (analyzing problems and finding solutions) more than the topic itself.
>or at least were at some point (it goes in cycles)
Indeed. And the periods in which I can be obsessed seem to be increasingly less common as I get older, but every now and then I get bitten and just have to bang it out.
This “you gotta program all day every day or else you are unfit for it”-attitude is incredibly toxic and harmful. No other profession has this. No dentist gets told he gotta setup a practice in his garden shed to practice pulling teeth, or else hell be a horrible dentist. No, doing job for 40 hours a week is enough to be one.
I agree on this, but I believe the comment was aimed more at the "Tinker-Attitude" that many STEM-People have.
And I believe many other professions have this to an extend: I'd imagine that many journalists and authors enjoy reading in their spare time. Every mechanic I know has a cellar full of half-finished machines he fiddles with in the evening.
I don't have the energy to code on private projects for eight hours after eight hours of coding at work (besides occasionally enjoying not sitting in front of a monitor...).
But every once in a while it bites me to blow 10 hours of tinkering on some strange useless problem, like simulating Logic-Gates with basic arithmetic.
It is very common for professional athletes and for anyone who wants to live off their art (painters, musicians, writers, etc). Most academic types I know are like that too.
There are plenty of programming jobs where 40hs a week is enough and you get paid a good salary.
Now, if you want to join a FAANG, that's a different story. But no one wins a Grammy by playing exclusively in weddings either.
That was not prescriptive but descriptive. I don't program every day after work either, but I do sometimes get terribly addicted to a problem and work on it a great deal. I haven't met a good programmer that didn't have it, much like you don't mean someone who's properly good at anything they don't practice a great deal.
> No dentist gets told he gotta setup a practice in his garden shed to practice pulling teeth
This is a weird argument to me, the medical field has an even more unhealthy work/life balance than our field. They absolutely "practice at home" (obviously not through home surgery, but reading and so). Dentists have an easier time than most other medical professions, but every dentist I've met regardless had extremely good work ethic and frequently obsessed over his work.
You can absolutely work 40hrs a week and be a good engineer business-wise. However, most people who are remembered for their contributions to a field (and weren't just in the right place at the right time) dedicated a large part of their life to it. That includes writers, poets, musicians, doctors, anything.. to quote old Onion videos: are tests biased against students who just don't give a shit?
You can be a great engineer and not need to do any recreational programming.
The thought that some devs are more respectable skill-wise because they hack in their free time is short sighted.
You literally have 8 hours a day to experiment and try all you want, everyday you have the opportunity to learn, hone your skills and experiment and good companies actually have days dedicated to experimenting.
Obviously you can't get great at this job if you don't bang your head on problems for days, but I fail to see that's a quality of recreational programming.
> I have always struggled with how to advise my friends & family on this path of learning. It seems like everyone wants to be a WFH developer these days, but I don't know how to enable them to succeed on that path.
The best advice is to get a proper CS or Engineering degree honnestly.
> But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles.
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
> I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more compelling motivational poster than "What hard problems do you enjoy working on?" (and even that's a lot better than "What kind of pain are you willing to endure?"), but it might give some people a more realistic way to approach finding their life's work.
---
A lot of people don't have the pain tolerance for the "this isn't fun" part of software development that is necessary to get past certain plateaus of skill.
I feel like I have a reasonably good track record of helping people get into tech (and was myself helped) and I'd note two things I've found very helpful:
1. It is very useful to let people know that the first ~500 hours of programming are the worst (not unusual for hard skills). I've seen now successful developers reduced to scream crying by the feelings lack of agency and overwhelming complexity during this period. Knowing it gets better can help them push through this phase.
2. Many people capable of being good developers respond badly to "Go build something you want to build!" because they don't actually want to build things, or the things they want to build are too outside their skill range and they feel disempowered. Giving someone a list of projects to do and textbooks to work through can be much more effective for certain people (like myself!).
Another way to handle 1.) is to let people modify the work of a master and build on their sholders to do fun stuff. I'd already "learned" a few languages (commodore basic, c, pre 98c++, and x86asm) well enough to do toy problems, but when my folks bought me quake I found it had a compiler and all the game logic in quakeC. I played the game a good bit but quickly it became about creating weird modifications, odd weapons shoggoths as pets etc. That exposed me to idiomatic code written by professionals, John Carmack presumably among them, while letting me skip everything between toy program or interrupt handler and using a game engine.
Code spells, a game on steam has some of that benefit, but nothing I jave seen since has been quite as accessible as quakeC
It's like exercise. Everyone wants to be fit, but very few are willing to put out the sustained effort to get fit. There are no shortcuts, either. You can't pretend to be fit, you can't buy it.
Reddit has a bunch of posts where people will document their path to become a developer. Rarely do I see them go directly to building something they want to build.
It’s mostly people taking online courses and building the projects in those courses. They’ll do a few different courses and build up maybe 10-15 smaller projects before tackling something they want to build.
An "Intro to Logic" (Pseudocode) class was required at my university before you could move on to any of the actual programming courses. It was a glorified linear programming course - think BASIC or BATCH with a bunch of jumps and goto's.
This is unironically a good idea. The main stumbling block isn't programming per se, it's breaking down a conceptual, informal idea of what you have to do in a formal language.
It matters very little whether it's linear programs, ASM instructions, LISP forms or C++ classes.
On the other hand, our University course started with half-baked explanation of what "public static void main" means (Java entry point) on the first day. It was horrible and no one understand anything until a few classes later we go to the meat of making/building stuff.
Yeah, I probably already commented on this some time ago, but I think Java is really, really bad as a teaching language. The language itself is just fine and much better than most people give it credit for, if you are a professional developer. As a teaching language is full of cerimony and it forces upon you an object model that you can't fully understand until much later. It's too much "in the weeds", if that makes sense.
Yea, AFAICT, Java has fallen off in schools in favor of Python, which is less opinionated about things like that. It has classes if you want them, lambdas if you want them.
(Disclosure: I do corporate training (Python and Data Science) for a living.)
I generally don't teach coding to newbies, so a lot of the coding I teach is correcting poor mental models and teaching features (somewhat) unique (or different) in Python.
My best Pandas courses have been when the client opts to use their data for the course (instead of my canned data). The students are already subject matter experts with the data and when they learn some of the tricks to slice and dice, summarize, and visualize, they are off to the races. They dig right in.
Teaching as the article suggests is very difficult because examples that appeal to some or boring or confusing to others. I'm not saying it won't work, but there are cons as well. When I'm teaching with my "canned data", I try to mix in a few different datasets from different areas so students can see that the ideas are generally adaptable.
I always thought the best way to learn programming is to find a program you want to create, and then figure out how to make that happen.
This is still how i learn (most effectively) today. If i want to learn a new language or something, i write something that i always wanted to write in it anyways. That way it doesn't get boring.
I think what you're describing might be similar in that canned-data is not interesting.
Yes, learning is much easier if you have motivation. How do you motivate kids, if they rather play games rather than coding (and they even ignore in-game scripted coding such ad Minecraft or Roblox coding)?
> How do you motivate kids, if they rather play games rather than coding (and they even ignore in-game scripted coding such ad Minecraft or Roblox coding)?
Do such kids need to start with regular programming languages? Wouldn't visual languages be a simpler starting point for them to get motivated?
Try a game like Factorio or Satisfactory. Even just Minecraft can be good enough to train their problem solving and critical thinking skills.
They don't need to start with redstone to learn to code. They should play the game and naturally realize that redstone is a way to solve their problem (like making an automatic sliding 2x2 door) and then solve it.
I feel like those skills will take you much further in life because now you have an extra tool to solve problem no matter what field you end up going into. And since programming is so powerful, it's often one of the best tools for the job so kids will naturally pick it up.
The trouble I had in Factorio is that it's deliberately not giving you very powerful tools in order to be a better game. The authors do not want you to skip their fun game by solving a tricky optimisation problem yourself instead.
My feeling, from ~eight years as a mostly-highschool math and science teacher plus parenting as my main work these last few years, is that this motivation to learn is best established very early on, hence my support for universal birth-to-three support (I’m in the USA) in the interest of minimizing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs/trauma) and teaching parents how to cultivate a growth mindset. Intrinsic motivation is powerful.
I was not a beneficiary of such care, and have done a lot of re-learning, especially around what I’m feeling, and being okay with not doing “perfect”.
One of the other places birth-to-three programs pay for themselves is to catch physical (e.g. hearing) problems early. That allow for correction and minimizes the affects in learning, reducing cost in later schooling.
Heck, I'm employed to write code and I'd still rather play games. Just I get paid for the code, and not for playing the games.
But you will do better teaching-wise if you do find something that has intrinsic motivation, not turning it into a chore.
It just might not be the right time! They've basically got until they are 18-20ish to decide to get into it. The programming books my parents gave me after 8th grade never interested me. The 11th grade programming class didn't either. The junior year of college tangentially-related course where I was like "oh I could write a program to help with this homework!" That did the trick for me.
So just keep trying, see if you can find programming-related aspects of other hobbies. And just try to focus on them learning things around those hobbies or obsessions, even if it doesn't seem to have a practical application. Get in the habit of going deep on subjects and practicing learning.
But you need some concept of what kinds of problems are solvable with a computer before you could really be inspired to program one.
And more than that, you need to have a concept of the difficulty of a given problem for a beginner or expert. Obviously a beginner will be wildly off, but probably needs some concept of the level of difficulty.
For example, lots of people have motivation to write a game. But few have the level of obsession to follow through with it. Maybe they should do a basic iPhone convenience app or something first instead.
It's a matter of scope and expectations. Leave your epic space opera in your dreams and take baby steps using easier tools and concepts. Once you find some fun try product-izing it.
> But few have the level of obsession to follow through with it.
If the goal is to release a complete product, then you're right that that's a problem. However, if the goal is learning, half a game is a great way to learn about a variety of systems and how to program for them!
This is true. You do have to watch for the "adult piano beginner" syndrome, though.
I'll explain: many piano teachers won't take adult beginners, purely because they have unrealistic ideas of how good they're going to be. They want to play a Chopin Etude or the Goldberg Variations or a Brahms Intermezzo, and don't want to spend time struggling with Clementi.
Well, sorry. You won't be that good for a long, long time, if ever. It could be that some beginning programmers also have wild ideas of doing a game as good as GTA, all by themselves.
I find the comparison really odd as someone in the opposite position - I had formal classical piano training from 8 years old until I gave it up during college, and later learned how to code entirely through copying other people's code and Stackoverflow in my mid 20s. Piano to me feels much more like a sport, in that there's a very visceral, physical aspect to playing, and in turn a ton of effort goes into optimizing everything from where your fingers should be placed to how hard or soft one is striking a key. Practicing is effectively comparable to training for some sort of non-team sport much more than anything else. I don't have perfect pitch, but learning how to read music is a very small part of the whole experience, and I would think that as an adult someone learning piano will find the physical aspect, particularly the finer motor elements, to be the primary hinderance to being really great. Writing code is entirely different in that it feels much more like learning a subject matter, and there's neither something akin to the apotheosis of the particular thing you're working on that you aim to emulate, nor hard boundaries as to determine your proficiency through performance. It's cool if your code doesn't work when you test it, you can fix that. It just feels like apples and oranges in the experience.
If you're picking up basketball at age 30, I hope you know that you're never going to be anywhere nearly as good as Curry, or Lebron. But you can definitely pick up a subject matter and become an expert later in life. Heinrich Schliemann essentially began his archeological career at age 36 and yes, basically excavated Troy in the worst way possible, but managed to actually excavate Troy. That's the difference between an adult piano learner and an adult code learner, I think.
Have you tried formal computer science training? Learning programming through copying from StackOverflow sounds to me like about as good idea as learning piano by watching Synthesia videos on Youtube.
> If you're picking up basketball at age 30, I hope you know that you're never going to be anywhere nearly as good as Curry, or Lebron
Well, I hope so, too. However, in basketball, the really good players aren't even going to let you play with them, so you're forced to play with people your own level. In music, you're constantly hearing 8-year-olds who are better than you will ever be.
I believe it's the motor skills, and the plasticity of the brain. Personally, I memorize pieces with no effort at all, but sight reading is a bitch for me and always will be.
In music there's also the stubborn belief that anyone who's older than 8 is too old to learn, and the idea that the goal of music lessons is to train professional musicians and anyone over 8 is not going to be ready at college age and has to pick a different job anyway.
No, I don't think there is. In my area (heavily Chinese), parents seem to believe, fervently, that children should learn an instrument. Especially girls.
Lots of parents think it's important for their kids to learn music, actually, with no thought that they'll become professionals. In fact, most of them would be horrified if that happened.
From my perspective that's some kind of weird Chinese thing. For a different view, you could for example look at the discussion at https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/120433/why-don-t-p.... It's a long thread, but search for "professional" and you'll find the same by multiple posters. There's also an interesting conflict of interest between students, their parents and music schools.
Just got around to looking at that Stack Exchange thread, and I'm reminded why I dislike that site so much:
It's full of PLPs (Pedantic Little People, or you can substitute a different P-word for "people"). And why is it full of PLPs? They get little brownie points for answering, and when you get to certain levels, then you're allowed to do even more! So they compete with each other and downvote your answer for, well, pedantic reasons.
I suppose this site has some of that, but it's not nearly as obnoxious.
Anyhow: I finally found a teacher who played standards, and actually studied with George Shearing! But they're few & far between.
Yes, music.stackexchange is pretty bad. Did you find any of the parts where someone writes that the classical teaching style is for training professional musicians or at least developed in the time when it was?
Regrettably, my visceral reaction to that site kept me from reading very far.
But yeah, conservatories are definitely that. "You, too, can get an expensive education and then struggle to compete with 200 other kids just like you for the the very few paying gigs in classical music!"
That's how I stop myself every time a desire to buy a guitar shows up. I'd like to play some solos from Ten Years After, Iron Maiden, or Dire Straits, but then I realize that this will take forever to learn, and my middle age issues wouldn't help with that either.
I used to teach from the "program you want to create" angle, because that's how I learned programming. (JS/MEAN bootcamp)
The problem was that about 95% of my students didn't have a program they wanted to create. Some just wanted a hobby. Some wanted a better job. Some wanted to do a startup and manage a team, but they didn't really know what kind of startup to do. One guy joined because he made discord bots and thought node.js was cool, but learning loops started to get boring for him.
Having a good mental model of a language seems like one of the fastest ways to be more productive in that language. Do you have any recommended resources for developing a strong mental model of python? For reference, Dan Abramov’s course JustJavascript [1] provides an amazing mental model of JavaScript, and Josh Comeau’s css for js developers [2] course provides an amazing model for understanding css. I have 5+ years programming in python but admittedly do not know much about the internals so my mental model is pretty weak!
I was struggling to find why does
a = [1, 2, 3]
a = b
b = b + [1]
return a different value as compared to
b += [1]
Looking into the source code, everything became clear. The + operator returns a pointer to a new list np containing all the elements from a and b, while += merely appends and returns a pointer to the original list
There is a truly excellent series of lectures on YouTube from a college course on the Python interpreter internals. But I can't for the life of me find it. One resource I can recommend though is pythontutor.com. It's a tool that will step through your code snippet and show how the code maps onto the internal representation.
Feel this mental model approach is part of the appeal of Scheme and SICP as you start with simple replace model but near the end (still exploring chapters 4,5) you get shown how to build an interpreter which forces you to know how it all works because otherwise it doesn't.
Feel that's sentiment get more now - it's *not* magic but the fact that everything works given it's all illusions is magical
Why thanks for asking yes I do: I recommend my book, Illustrated Guide to Python 3 [0].
Yes, I teach "professional" Python programmers who lack a lot of the fundamentals. It is so easy to get my with Stack Overflow style of programming these days. (Plus a lot of my students don't want to be "programmers" they use Python as tool to get some job done.)
> Having a good mental model of a language seems like one of the fastest ways to be more productive in that language.
True, but teaching s programming language is different than teaching programming.
Diving into a new language is something you do if you already understand how computers work and how to turn requirements into code. But to first acquire that understanding as a beginner, it's not enough to be introduced to the specifics of any particular language, which is what the article is talking about; you need to clarify what is the role of a programmer in understanding a problem and finding ways to model it as a group of data structures and functions that live in the computer.
Any teaching, training, has to hook with the experience of students. Otherwise, it will lead to cramming, etc; that's what we see in grade-driven teaching.
You are doing a great service by using the client data to solve "mini-problems" of your students.
I think you've got that backward. I think parent poster is complaining about teaching methods where the belief is that "answering questions" -> "mastery." "Grade-driven teaching" here refers more to the "all we're gonna do is give you homework and a test." It's like industrialization of teaching - no mentoring or individual conversation, just tests and reading material. When you've got 1 teacher and 20-40 kids, it's about all you can do.
Lots of passing of tests from short-term memorization that's then promptly forgotten.
I've forgotten the material from many courses I've taken. But I've also discovered that the knowledge quickly returns if I retake a course on the same material, far quicker than it took the first time. The knowledge is still there, it just needs some WD-40 to break it loose again.
And yes, doing column buckling problem sets in college enabled me to size the jackscrew for the 757, as it was a column buckling problem.
I don't know anything about column buckling, but if you'd cranked out a bunch of column buckling problem sets and not paid any attention to when/where it would be applicable, would it still have helped you later? If you had forgotten the exact technique, would you have been able to check a reference book anyway?
Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history? Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C?
(The flip side of this is folks I've worked with who will immediately say "this is the Command Pattern" or such and jump to writing a bunch of code that either is massive overkill and/or just breaks down when the real world introduces some edge cases.)
I knew how the column buckling equations were derived, therefore I knew when they were applicable and when they weren't.
As for checking a reference, I knew that "column buckling" was a thing. Before I studied it, I didn't know the concept even existed, and would have no idea how to look up something I didn't even know existed or what it might be called.
> Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history?
How are you going to understand WW1 without knowing who Ludendorff was? I know that if you don't know names and dates and events, you cannot have a mastery of history. You don't have any framework to hang analysis or understanding on.
> Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions
Nobody does that. But I will say that if you can't name any of them, I guarantee you don't know squat about C.
> and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C?
I wonder how many C experts you know can't answer a question about what a pointer is.
What’s interesting to me is that I’m tue internet you’ve got loads of students and loads of more experienced medium people meeting on stackoverflow and forums and right there where there is individual connection and back and forth, the experts keep trying to silence it because they want only expert discussions about advanced topics.
Like the companies that will help you leave as a customer because at least you leave with a good feeling and might come back, versus the companies which make it hard so you hate them forever. Experts go round Internet forums with a “fuck off lazy noob” attitude then wonder why the forum is in decline and empty with only noobs traffic, and then blame it on the noobs, because they are overrunning the site and that must be driving the “good people” out.
Mentoring and individual communication happens all over, but it looks like “doing their homework for them” which is verboten.
If they don’t learn from your answers, you might, other readers might.
The fix for “eternal September” is not “duplicate question” it’s that the older questions and answers need to be deleted, forgotten. The important bit is the development of ideas in the questioner and answerer, not the production of paperwork.
I suspect there is room for a huge forum/site based around these ideas that would combine collaborative editing, live examples, questions, and push new people not on “how to ask a good question” but “how to engage in a back and forth discussion” in some way.
This has been a disjointed blog post in a comment.
/watches straw man fall over without putting up a fight.
Would you rather work with someone who added a major subsystem to one of your compilers for fun or someone who had never coded but could recite the ISO standard by heart? Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”?
If measurements tend to become targets over time then the goal of “develop expertise” measured by “pass a test” shifts to a goal of “pass the test”, and the test is limited to what you can ask hundreds of students in a couple of hours, and they’ve seen practise papers and last year’s papers and you can’t talk to them, and you can’t see them work or the results of their work.
Is that then a good way, to develop and validate their expertise? Is it the best available way?
> Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”?
All the people who believe that "teaching the test" is not real knowledge.
For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar? How about consult a physician who couldn't pass his medical boards? How about get on an airplane with a pilot who flunked flight school, but "really knows how to fly"?
And yes, there are bad tests. But there are also good tests, and they work. Personally, I've never encountered a person who mastered a topic but couldn't get a good grade in it.
Lawyers who lose cases, physicians who couldn't save their patients, and pilots who have been in plane crashes still get to work in their occupation after the fact. Experience rules over all.
In your examples all those people never got to practice their craft. Lawyers can't practice law without a bar, physicians can't perform surgery without a medical license, etc. But software development isn't like that. What if there was a surgeon who has completed 10,000 successful surgeries but never went through med school? What if there was a lawyer who won major cases with no law degree? Or a commercial pilot who successfully flew for years on a fraudulent license and only stopped flying because he got caught? (That last one actually happened a few months ago).
If you could choose, would't you pick the surgeon with a wildly successful track record over the recently graduated med school student who has never done a surgery outside of residency?
Notice that I said “pilots who have been in plane crashes” and not “pilots who caused plane crashes.” This goes along with the theme of the lawyer losing the case, the surgeon losing the patient, etc. Sometimes you can do everything right and still everything goes wrong. Which is to say that the experience gained from these events makes these people better practitioners; it doesn’t matter what school they went to or what test they took if they gained real world experience practicing their craft.
No, I wouldn’t fly with a pilot who flunked out of flight school, but I would certainly fly with a pilot who’s flown for 10 years without a license over a pilot with a brand new PPL and <2000 hours flight experience.
Maybe for better perspective we can try this exercise: let’s say there’s a world renowned brain surgeon in, say, Norway who has worked for decades and performed tens of thousands of surgeries. No mistakes! Tens of thousands of happy stories!
But wait. Our intrepid surgeon can’t practice in the US because she didn’t go to medical school here! If she wanted to operate on a patient in the US mainland, she’d lose to a doctor who just exited residency!
If you were the patient who needed brain surgery, who would you pick? The world renowned expert or the guy who just finished training? Your logic dictates that the guy with the credentials wins out for no reason other than they went through whatever process to obtain those credentials, regardless if there are better metrics or methods to judge occupational success by.
> Our intrepid surgeon can’t practice in the US because she didn’t go to medical school here!
That's not my position. My position is if he was that good, he would pass the medical examinations.
> pilot
I'm not a pilot, but my dad was, other family members are, and I worked at Boeing designing the 757. Actually flying an airplane is rather simple. Most of pilot training is about handling an emergency.
These days, emergencies in the air are very rare. You may never have one in a career. But if you do have one, trying to learn how to deal with it on the job is a good way to die.
If someone really did fly 10,000 hours, but still cannot pass the certification test, he's a fool and you're a fool to fly with him.
Also, please do not confuse "did not take the test" with "flunked the test".
P.S. I have some training materials my dad had to learn. You're not going to learn that stuff by just flying around. Much of it is things that are learned about the airplane by expert test pilots, like how fast can you fly it without tearing the airplane apart. Do you think a pilot ought to know that speed before he gets in the cockpit? How about questions like how much runway do you need with a specific amount of airplane gross weight and altitude of the runway? I remember getting on a plane in Colorado and the pilot threw our luggage out, saying it was too much weight for the altitude, and it would arrive with the next flight. Do you want to fly with the pilot who couldn't make such computations? It doan' matter how good at flying he is if the airplane won't lift off the runway.
> For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar?
It's not about hiring a lawyer who flunked the bar. It's more like, how many lawyers are bad lawyers despite passing the bar.
I don't know about law specifically, but in my experience a lot of people who pass tests don't have deep understanding. Vice versa may also be true depending on the test.
Take all 8 billion human shapes, four right angle corners and straight sides is the test, all sides the same length is expertise. You're saying that all squares are definitely rectangles, which I agree with. I'm saying all rectangles aren't necessarily squares. Then it feels like you're saying there aren't many more rectangles than squares, citing that there are unquestionably squares. Unstated I'm suggesting there are a lot more rectangles than squares, by Sturgeons Law 95% of tests are crud, so there are far more people who passed a test than there are people who passed a test and have expertise. There are so many people in IT with coworkers who passed MCSE or A+ tests but cannot do what the test said they can do that it has become a meme, for one example.
That 5% of tests are rigorous and accurately identify squares is not really something I question, but I might question that the people who pass them were "taught to take the test" and nothing else.
(Would you say 7 years of degree, medical school, hospital residency, rotation around departments, counts as "teaching to the test", i.e. "an unhealthy focus on excessive repetition of simple, isolated skills ("drill and kill") [which] limits the teacher's ability to foster a holistic understanding of the subject matter."? - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test )
Again you're repeating the assertion "if you have expertise you can answer questions", "squares are rectangles", which isn't the point of contention.
It's the other way which is in question, "if you can answer questions, does that mean you definitely have expertise?". Is being able to answer questions the same as having expertise? Are there people who CAN answer questions but have no expertise? If so, how many?
Referencing your other pilot comment, is being able to say what action you should take in an emergency, the same thing as having the calmness and presence of mind and judgement to actually take that action in an emergency instead of locking up and forgetting and panicking? Certainly the pilot who does act well in an emergency could tell you about it, but can all the people who can tell you about it, do it?
You absolutely did say passing a test is proof of mastery, and you cited lawyers and doctors passing tests as evidence, and you said "there are bad tests, but there are good tests and they work", with emphasis.
I passed German at school, despite being unable to speak German. Anybody who spoke German could have tried to have a conversation with me and see that I couldn't, that would be a good way to judge my supposed skills. Any test which is not that, any test which is a proxy to that, or a way to judge that with less effort, is worse than doing that. Teaching me to answer the questions they were going to ask on German grammar, or recite the sentences they were going to expect me to recite, is even worse.
Of course people with absolutely no skill fail tests more than random, who would question that.
Yep, a lot of mini-problems that are generally relevant. I also show "real-world" code for every concept. Then they can see how this is applied in the Standard Library or other popular Python libraries.
I'm a huge fan of Nature of Code and I agree that it's a wonderful book, but I don't think it's a book for people who are beginners (i.e. they're learning how to code). Daniel Shiffman has a ton of resources which are better suited for people who want to learn how to code - Learning Processing, the Coding Train channel, etc.
Motivation is the primary hurdle when teaching folks how to code. Having a goal to accomplish keeps them motivated, especially if there's feedback early - games, robots are good starting points.
> If you’ve read any of the introductory Processing textbooks or taken a class on programming with Processing (and hopefully you’ve done one of these things to help prepare you for this book)
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a beginner book at all.
As a self-taught, highly agree almost all intro material I was coming upon back in 2013/14/15 was basically just a reference throwing concepts at you without a context that was incrementally increasing in complexity to guide you. I was one for trivia, so this was fine to a certain extent, but he's dead right, the job is not writing code (as much as the JIRA Industrial Complex would like to make it out to be), the job is thinking and problem-solving.
I only began to understand the thinking needed for doing my job after after mentoring by a consultant who fully grasped and could communicate this, where all the other in-house seniors were too stuck in the Complex for whatever reason to transmit this clearly (likely related to the near-unihibited freedom the consultant had relative to the in-house seniors).
Teaching everyone the same way is wrong. Everyone has different learning styles, education and life experience.
If there is a large enough market share for a topic grouping like learners together can be very efficient.
Creating a one sized fits most solution is the default setting for many educators and yields an "okay" result.
Allowing learning at your own pace, with community support and many styles of consumable content will give a excellent result for self motivated individuals.
Students who are not motivated or need help with motivation can be handled differently.
Edit:
Learning styles has a broad meaning more than just the "I'm a visual learner."
> "Everyone has different learning styles" is a common misconception
The myth of different sensory orientations to learning is definitely, well, a myth; it is probably not justified to go beyond that and say everyone learns best with the same pacing and other details of approach.
I thought "learning styles" were largely debunked as a myth now?
The linked article describes the structure of a reference book, identifies it as a structure suitable for a reference and those with significant experience, and then decries it as a tutorial for newbies. It seems rather obvious - I wouldn't try learning a new language by reading a dictionary either. It doesn't support the hyperbole in the title. There are many good tutorials for learning to code in different programming languages, sometimes it's hard to pick them out though.
What works for me, and pretty much everybody I've watched try to learn anything, is a simple loop. Conceptual explanations (whether written, verbal, or visual), applying the concepts with exercises / practice / work with examples to follow, digging into the details using a reference, and then broadening to the next set of concepts. Eventually the pattern recognition kicks in and people can see the connections and predict the rest.
I've been thinking about this topic for a long time. I was a secondary math and science teacher for 25 years, and I taught intro programming classes whenever I could. Later I wrote Python Crash Course, which was largely informed by my experiences working with students - my direct classroom teaching, and my attempts to find resources for students who were capable of independent learning. I've looked critically at many learning resources over the years.
I certainly agree with the author's main point. Giving people a series of dry lectures or chapters that focus on syntax, without any intentional narrative about what it all means or why we should learn it is not particularly effective.
I'll make a brief comparison to the math materials I've reviewed for secondary education. There are many curriculum resources that are really well structured mathematically - all the math is correct, and each new topic builds on previous topics coherently, and leads somewhere specific in the end. But most of these kinds of resources are fairly dry to students who are not intrinsically motivated to learn math. Then there are many resources that present things in a fun or interesting way, but lack a coherent structure to the math that's presented. These are better at catching students' interest, but they still don't bring students to a place where they understand math well enough to use it effectively in their own lives. There are few curriculum resources that truly do a good job of hitting both of these goals - well structured mathematically, and with compelling topics. It's difficult because the people creating the resources need a really strong pedagogical background and a really strong mathematical background. People often tend to focus on one or the other of these areas.
I see the same issue in how learning resources are developed for programming. There are probably thousands of books that have a table of contents similar to what the author presents here, without a coherent narrative to motivate people through all those topics. Many of these books are technically sound, but they don't carry people through all the topics because there's too little tying all the topics together. Then there are a whole bunch of resources that use a specific compelling topic to grab people's attention; the author uses the example of card games. There are a couple limitations here: if you pick an interesting context, you only appeal to the people who like that subject. Also, you then have to stretch the context to cover concepts that aren't specifically needed for that context. That is, building a card game project brings up many topics and ties them together. But what do you do with important topics that weren't needed? Do you leave them out? Do you present them separately? Do you force them into the context?
One of my big frustrations with learning resources, especially k-12, is that they do a great job of grabbing kids' attention. We've kind of solved that problem - young people are plenty interested in learning to code. But to really gain the ability to build out your own ideas, you need to work through the list of topics that the author of this article presents.
What's the conclusion? There's no one way to teach people to code. We need a variety of resources that address all of these issues in ways that meet the needs of a variety of learners. People who are designing these resources, whether they're developing a book, video course, online tutorial, etc, need to think through these issues and have a clear and intentional approach to how their resource is structured.
Tutorials do exist for absolute beginners. Seems like the author is implying they rarely exist which is incorrect. "Hello world" is a tutorial/real world example. I learnt the how to code through the "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" by Michael Hartl.
The tutorial market is different than the computer science 101 crowd, so you have tutorials for one, textbooks for the other.
The issue with using tutorials in textbooks is that it's more effective to use 1 great example per chapter, than shoe-horn 1 monolitic project as an example for 13 chapters. And the three CS 101 books I've read do have good examples or interesting problems to solve. If I remember correctly the Harvard 101 book does use cards for objects.
One problem that the Ruby on Rails tutorial has as a CS 101 book is that there is so much boiler-plate stuff needed to have a functioning monolithic example. To do "hello world", need Database -> Code -> Template... when you can do: print("hello world"), then move on to next chapter.
I was going to make a comment very similar to yours- there's been plenty of programming 101 books, though maybe more so in previous decades starting in the '90s, which has the author present a project or a series of projects and each chapter involves building out the project while introducing concepts. While those books tend to be about teaching how to use a specific framework, SDK, or language rather than programming in general, that project-based method of pedagogy is common.
What's annoying about those books is that sometimes you don't care to go through the entire project, you just want to jump to a specific topic, but you're forced be part of a continuous narrative. Though in modern times where every technical book has a corresponding repository somewhere with code samples, you can at least use that code rather than starting chapter one.
Whether you want to learn from how-to projects, or from abstract first principles, there's resources out there for both. Teaching how to code is not broken at all. Maybe teaching data structures and algorithms could use more work- but that's the subject for a different article.
I agree there are so many issues with coding education, (full disclosure, that's why I'm building Qvault.io) but I don't think the big problems are the ones presented here.
I see the following as the biggest unsolved problems:
1. Online learning rarely teaches you what you should be learning. Resources are useless if you don't know which subject matter is right for you yet.
2. Platforms don't give you a feel for "completion", e
g. when and how should I start job searching.
3. You don't get personal mentorship or cohort support like you would at school
4. Too many videos, not enough code. Almost all learning when it comes to coding should include writing code.
5. Healthy mix of guided and unguided learning. Courses are great for abstract concepts, projects need to follow so that you can apply what you learn on your own
Exactly this! To quote myself from a couple of years ago:
I wish the style of teaching complex programming topics walked me through the pain of making something work, exploring a few alternative solutions, showing the tradeoffs, and then after the pain has been experienced by the learner, a proper solution is finally introduced and recommended. IMO it's a much more powerful technique for teaching if you walk the learner through the pains first, then arrive at a solution, and tell them that "you've just [discovered how ownership works in rust]"; i.e. the concept is given a name at the _very end_, not defined at the beginning as a solution to a pain the learner never experienced. Unfortunately very few books/tutorials take this approach.
I feel like the average person already knows why. They know what they want and they just want the info on how to do it.
I don’t think the order of teaching presented in the article as bad actually is bad. What I think the problem I and others had is learning from a book to start with is really hard. Stuff doesn’t get retained well or make sense.
Programming finally clicked for me when I did the codeacademy class for JavaScript in 2012. What helped was it wasn’t just shoving walls or text at me. It was “here is a very tiny concept, go try it. Now here is another tiny concept, try this”
Interestingly related to the author's point of teaching using cards.
When I used to give coding interviews one of my favorite tasks was to implement the scoring rules of poker[1]. People would often ask "why ask them about poker?" and I'd show them that there is a ton of skill coverage
1. Decomposition of requirements into sub problems
2. pattern matching for code reuse and composition
3. seeing if they can come up with a decent algorithm to communicate to and from sub functions the results
4. seeing if they can come up with an ordering mechanism for cards
5. seeing if they can come up with a for loop that counts if there are 5 of something
6. String parsing to their own intermediate representation of cards
All these skills are used basically daily (at least in my workplace)
[1]: a good description of the rules, sample IOs, and myself as an oracle (ask me anything, no expectation of knowing poker itself) served to help keep "poker" from being the subject matter tested
If you truly believe that "poker" isn't the subject matter being tested, run the same interview question (this weekend) with a friend, blind, on scoring hands of cribbage. I'll wait. https://bicyclecards.com/how-to-play/cribbage/
A bit of a nuanced problem here. I've played a lot of crib too.
I hear your point, I guess my point is that serious measures are taken to dampen the difference between someone who knows poker and someone who doesnt. I've actually found largely candidates do not know the game so the calibrated comparisons is mostly between people who don't know the game.
Crib may actually be a better option -- the more esoteric the game, the less pre-knowledge plays a factor.
Edit: also NB: the only part that was to be implemented was the relative rank of a hand (ie, which hand won) . So the analogous equivalent in the crib example would be just the scoring of each hand.
I actually ran the interview on some coworkers for fun (they volunteered) and it was interesting to see the more senior (& IMO brighter) folks quickly recognize code reuse.
!@! SPOILER BELOW !@!
!@! SPOILER BELOW !@!
high card -> sort cards by value return cards[4]
Count cards (map[value]->int) --> Pair, pairs, triples, four of a kind
For each card is first token match? --> flush
sort cards , card[0] == card[4] + 4? --> straight
straight flush --> straight && flush
royal flush --> highcard == A && straight && flush
I don't know of any of my peers that took a course that heavily relied on a textbook; it feels like most university intro CS courses spend most of the time commitment in lectures and problem sets. I think many would agree that you learn the most doing homework.
It's been common for a decade now to recommend beginners on the internet looking for an intro to CS the course Harvard CS50. The course has attracted criticism for be overwhelming for a single semester, as it requires submitting assignments in Scratch, C, Python, SQL, and HTML/JS. However, I think it, like other well-acclaimed intro to CS courses do teach problem solving in via hand-held labs and problem sets. Perhaps its prevalence suggests the course is influential in the way CS is taught, but outside of Yale copying the course, I'm not sure.
I think the problem sets in CS 50 are effective for teaching problem solving. Looking at examples of problem sets for the most recent semester (I did the Fall 2012, so it's changed a bit) there is...
- making an animation or game in Scratch which must have have a loop, condition, and variable
- printing pyramids of # characters
- caesar encryption
- ballot counting
- implementing bitmap image filters
- a spell checker
- writing SQL queries against a database of movies
- writing the frontend of a website
- writing a basic full-stack web app
I guess the main difference between the course and the post's proposal is that it doesn't follow a single narrative, so when you apply concepts in your head is only after the first introduction.
Looking on other resources I encountered at Georgia Tech, I remember both the intro to CS class I saw others take and the cool, interactive intro to CS textbook Mark Guzdial showed my class How to Think Like a Computer Scientist [1]. They both start with python turtle graphics towards the beginning to teach variables and loops before venturing off into other concepts. I think the first half of Automate the Boring stuff with Python actually faces the issues the author cites before diving into common applications in the second half; I do wonder now many working professionals learned from this text which I've generally liked at a glance. I suppose the most influential intro to CS materials are for AP CS A, although I'm not familiar with the course.
This reminds me of when I took Java in college. One of the prerequisites was Introduction to Computer Programming 1 & 2 (101 and 102).
1 was along the lines of what was on the top of this article:
Chapter 1: Types
Chapter 2: Variables
Chapter 3: Operators/Math
Chapter 4: Control structures
Chapter 5: Arrays
Chapter 6: Functions
Chapter 7: Structs
Chapter 8: Classes and Objects
Chapter 9: Methods
Chapter 10: Inheritance and Polymorphism
And 2 was algorithms (sorts, etc)
Then the Java class was:
Chapter 1: Types
Chapter 2: Variables
Chapter 3: Operators/Math
Chapter 4: Control structures
Chapter 5: Arrays
Chapter 6: Functions
Chapter 7: Structs
Chapter 8: Classes and Objects
Chapter 9: Methods
Chapter 10: Inheritance and Polymorphism
But not much about what you can do in Java specifically.
I understand going over these concepts briefly and how to do them specifically in that class, but to have the whole class focus on them was not very useful. Again, 101 was a PREREQUISITE! So there shouldn't be anyone in the class who hasn't taken it!
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadHave the student choose what kind of thing they're trying to accomplish, then structure the class dynamically based on the needs of their choices, or something like that
That was a big challenge of mine in school. I wasn't that interested in the assignments, because I was building boring stuff that didn't really solve problems, let alone ones I cared about.
I am pretty prolific in my career, and I'm not even what you would call a hardcore dev. Which brings me to my next gripe with CS curriculum: It is geared towards training hardcore devs and not any other type of engineer.
The types of coders we should have some sort of curriculum for, which we to this day mostly do not:
-SRE's -Ops people -Support people -PM's -Accountants/General finance -DBA's -SysAdmins -Network engineers -Cloud engineers
What CS curriculum doesn't include networks, relational theory, hardware architecture, os architecture? How can anybody in those roles be successful without at least informally understanding the rudiments of big-O notation or without having some light scripting skills?
Certainly CS curricula could be improved, but a good one doesn't do too bad of a job at preparing you for technical roles IMO.
Those sorts of classes were available when I was in school, but it was not a whole track, it was 1 class each.
Second data point: These are the types of roles I meet in the wild who would benefit from coding, and they usually cannot (or can do some very light scripting).
I cannot explain it exactly. They just usually are missing that skill.
Studies in math education have shown that the way material is presented/courses are run has a huge impact on reducing disparities[2]. This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't. Students arrive in intro CS courses, are sat next to students who have been coding since they were 10, and are rightfully intimidated even though they could succeed in the course.
While I was at the University of Michigan, I helped a professor develop "Joy of Coding," a mini-course for high school students that focuses on sparking desire ("joy") rather than teaching CS first principles[3]. By the end of the first lesson, students are manipulating images with code – a real "WOW!" moment. It's built on Pathbird, a platform that I built (in conjunction with UMich faculty) to run more engaging and accessible courses in computer science and computational subjects. (Shameless plug: if you're interested in Pathbird, or even just to chat, drop me a line at travis@pathbird.com).
[1] https://cse-climate.engin.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites... (see page 8) [2] https://www.colorado.edu/eer/sites/default/files/attached-fi... [3] https://continuum.engin.umich.edu/programs/jumpstart-coding/
I feel like she's still struggling with the basics and doesn't have much self confidence at all. And she's not dumb.
I had exactly the same exercise on my first day on uni, we had to take some robot maze pathfinder game and adjust the algorithm a bit.
As someone who had been writing code for over a decade at that point (but who was unfamiliar with Java), I still remember it was intimidating.
I cannot imagine how it must have felt for people without prior coding experience.
In hindsight, the quality of teaching actual coding at my uni was pretty poor. But coding in general is pretty hard to teach well in that setting.
1. Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee" and quit shopping in the Pink Aisle at the toy store and reinforcing that culture. Buy your kids Lego and Raspberry Pi circuit kits and see what happens.
2. CS is part coding, part science of algorithms, and part software engineering. We have to quit intertwingling all terms into the catchall "CS" bucket because sometimes "how to run excel" gets thrown in there too. Maybe best to drop the term altogether and use more descriptive names for each study.
Girls in STEM =/= Girls becoming professional programmers.
There are plenty of girls in STEM fields such as medicine, biology, geology, physics, Math, civil engineering...
The fact that not a lot of them want to be forced to sit before a computer 10 hours a day for the rest of their lives certainly isn't an issue if you asks me...
There is nothing about computer science or programming that is gender specific. It, ideally, should sit around 50-50, ±5%. So yes, it is a problem that it so heavily skews male.
As to why, it's multi-faceted cultural issue, with how our society treats boys and girls starting from birth. In other words, a pipeline issue.
Except the 10 hour a day part :) I believe the tendency to overwork is mostly a male thing.
To me, the very existence of "Girls in STEM" groups is sending a weird message to girls (and I’m apparently not the only one to think that). Something along the lines of “sure you can do STEM, you’re just not good enough to do it the regular way so we created a group just for you”.
Honestly that’s the message a lot of diversity initiatives end up sending.
As a high school CS teacher, I've seen how boys can be towards girls interested in coding.
All of this swings both ways, of course, and men are deterred from positions like elementary school teacher, nursing, and secretary roles. Gender being attached to jobs is just dumb in general, and keeps a lot of capable people from doing what they'd love.
I'm surprised. I was expecting the opposite (boys wanting more girls in the classroom!).
> All of this swings both ways, of course, and men are deterred from positions like elementary school teacher, nursing, and secretary roles.
It's interesting that there's an acknowledgement that we need more male nurses (from healthcare professionals) and male elementary school teachers (from experts in the field) and yet there are zero initiatives to do so.
By that I mean money being spent toward that goal. The same way there's a will to have more "diversity" in medicine... mainly so that people of color can go serve "their people" in underserved areas (read: not very attractive or lucrative).
But in computing we’re spending a fortune and investing time to essentially… commoditize ourselves.
I think they probably want to be around girls, but most boys are social morons at that age. There is also the element of them being able to get in cheap shots to impress their friends. They don't really think of the consequences.
> It's interesting that there's an acknowledgement that we need more male nurses (from healthcare professionals) and male elementary school teachers (from experts in the field) and yet there are zero initiatives to do so.
Agreed, especially on the school front, as I think it's important for kids in schools to have a range of influences during their early years.
But I think most important is that intro courses need to serve as jumping off points (i.e., they should be INTRO courses). Give students a taste and let them decide if they like it and want to take another bite.
For example, do BIPOC students in Botswana drop out at similar rates? Do non-BIPOC students in Taiwan experience similar drop out rates? What are the classes and course materials like in these countries in comparison to the US/Canada?
What about drop out numbers from international students? For example, do Polish women studying CS at American universities drop out at the same rate as American women? For those who do drop out, do they drop out for the same reasons?
If we want to get to the root of the problem we need both more breadth and more depth in our understanding. Too often we stop at the men/women (in America) or BIPOC/non-BIPOC (in America) divides, and then provide generalized solutions which have very limit impact.
I teach all four years in high school and each year I get more females rolling up. My recent graduating classes have had more females, but still only 20% or so, but my entry level classes now are 50/50.
Oddly, every female I've had who takes the higher level CS classes has graduated with the highest mark you can get on the exit exams. They routinely destroy the boys on any test and with regard to programming skills. Sadly, some of those who take it at the lower level are pushed by their parents to take other classes at higher levels in preparation for university admission. Parents sometimes carry that bias that females should not be engineers.
Just be aware that this is not everyones experience.
Many places boys are held back and girls are pushed forward.
And then afterwards boys gets told they are somehow "privileged" and would never be were they are if it wasn't for "male privilege".
Obviously this goes both ways, but there is at least some focus on it when it hurts girls.
If you try to mention the problems young innocent boys have, be prepared to get laughed out.
(I'm halfway expecting that even on HN too.)
This is experience.
If you had a cushy life, good for you. But don't tell others their experiences aren't real.
See, that post just read like negative chatter. "Folks are always doing wrong stuff." Meaningless to offer without anything concrete.
I will try without giving anything away, but you will need to help me here:
- Do you really think some people here haven't grown up with feminist teachers who took it way too far?
- How many times have you heard anything about "Girls who code" vs "Boys who code"?
- If you are actually interested and ready to see something ugly, just go back and try to read some "mens day" discussion on Twitter or I think even on HN too.
I've tried to be active in those days in a positive way. Last year I gave up. Any mention of today being mens day on company chat is immediately laughed off with something along the lines of "and so is 363 other days".
Meanwhile men die younger, have higher incarceration rates, more suicides, and gets less education.
And also the few times there is discussion it is often redirected to "how men are suffering from toxic masculinity" which is probably true but only a small problem.
I at least try to never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence. Geeks are not known for their social skills. Their reclusiveness and cliquishness limits their ability to learn social skills from their more skilled peers, instead trying to learn from each other, like the blind leading the blind. Combine that with hormones and even more limited experience dealing with women as people and you get them either trying to one-up each other in some of the sort of dick measuring contests they use as social dominance displays or using patronizing gestures to treat women as if they were children.
They are people, not objects for your pleasure. If your comment even remotely reflects your attitude towards them, then you might as well have been telling them "GET OUT! WE HATE WOMEN!".
Do you think that maybe if you treated them like people and welcomed them to the group with patient explanations, expecting nothing, they might have hung around?
Are you really better at it if you can’t retain them in the long run? The stats you shared are interesting, but to me it seems to highlight that students are getting “weeded out” at the beginning of the course. I would be curious to attempt a correlation with High school GPA and SAT scores. Because, if lower performing students leave, regardless of gender or race, that’s to be expected. But if overachieving students of color leave and their (white or asian) peers with lower grades don’t, now that’s an interesting issue.
> Students arrive in intro CS courses, are sat next to students who have been coding since they were 10, and are rightfully intimidated even though they could succeed in the course.
I would argue the solution here is to have different “levels” of intro courses. Because the converse is also true; students that are coming in with a decade of coding and who already had an introduction to programming might assume they will be able to “coast out” courses and then suddenly realize they are falling behind their peers. And then drop out.
It's not my experience. When I was a kid CS/IT didn't exist where I lived.
I was a math geek who loved to occupy himself with solving problems which are useless in real life and I was actively discouraged from it by parents, teachers and even bullied by peers. I still liked it but I tried not to speak about with anyone except some closest friends who accepted my weirdness. From my perspective it seemed that compared to boys the girls need more acceptance are less likely to pursue something they like if they are actively discouraged from it.
There are many different approaches to teaching out in the world, some free and some not. There are code boot camps, which survive only if they work -- since they only last 12-20 weeks, bad feedback would sink them pretty fast (unlike 4-year colleges, where the worthlessness of your degree doesn't become apparent until years later).
This article seems to imply this isn't how things are done now, but surely they still are by most?
Maybe I should just leave it at that - I am getting to a point where if someone doesn't have the willpower to go burn a whole weekend on a pile of bullshit that won't even compile (i.e. because they really want to solve some problem), then maybe they won't have the necessary pain tolerance required to truly master the skillset.
People want to learn the guitar|piano|violin, until they realize the amount of work it takes.
People want to get fit and jacked, until they realize the amount of work it takes.
People want to be a lawyer/doctor/engineer, until they realize the amount of work it takes.
Or they realize that they just don't really like it.
Programming isn't any different. One needs a particular mindset, and a level of patience to deal with debugging. It's not for everyone, and that's fine.
https://youtu.be/4UlgXIL0-3g?t=10
well yeah, those are the people who are actually lifting the weights. the rest of us get sorted into the "don't want to lift no" category
Slightly NSFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xZQ0YZ7ls4
What keeps me (and I think a lot of people) from getting ripped is the sheer consistency needed. Doing anything that isn't strictly necessary for 1-2 hours 5-6 days per week every week for years is extremely difficult imo. I get knocked off course very easily, sometimes for months at a time, and I have yet to find a solution for this.
I would say you have to also be happy with/enjoy confusion and frustration.
When I was in community college I had to take "Critical Thinking" as a pre-req for Symbolic Logic.
We spent the first 1/3 of the class, 8 weeks, analyzing truth statements, basically and, or and not. I was bored to tears, but attendance was mandatory, so I got to see how people absolutely struggled with this, and "just didn't get it". The average score on the mid-term covering that was a low D after 8 weeks of (excruciating for me) examples. I finished in <15 minutes and got 100%.
When you are in a bubble of people who work in engineering fields, especially in tech where logic is fundamental, I think it's easy to think that logic comes naturally to everybody, but it's far from ubiquitous and reading on here it sometimes feels like some people just don't realize this, especially those deep in tech.
In a way its kind of nice to get started with something new, because you don't need a plan at first. You just start kind of doing it, and then when you take breaks, you figure out the plan. Its amazing how quickly you can pick things up once you get into the habit of doing it very regularly. That initial hump is always, ALWAYS a huge pain, but there's no escaping it. Failing and flailing for that initial period is how you learn, not how you fail.
What I'm trying to get at is software engineering is an easy career if you're literally obsessed with it, and most software engineers are, or at least were at some point (it goes in cycles).
If you're not gonna do that, you simply can't assimilate the huge amount of knowledge needed to truly excel in even one facet of programming.
Work in an office writing documents and making spreadsheets? Have you ever simplified your job by writing a Word or Excel Macro?
Own a smart TV? Have you dug into its features until you know them backwards and forwards and can program it to (metaphorically) sing and dance on command?
Have you connected multiple things in your house together so you can control them from your phone, just because you could?
These are all examples of taking the initiative AND having the curiosity to dig into technical problems, and implement solutions. If you are like this, you will likely do well in tech and really enjoy it. If you DON'T have the tendency to do these sorts of things, you are probably going to have a bad time.
I think this is the best predictor of poor outcome in the field. The devs I've seen that chose the field for the money typically didn't last long and did everything they could to get into a non-technical position (often management). And then, unsurprisingly, fared poorly there as well.
I often see STEM pitched as a way to make money... And really the only people making money out of it are the institution cashing the first-year tuitions checks before they drop out. And that’s not even touching the predatory ISA that bootcamps offer…
I would also suggest that it's a matter of having an engineeristis attitude (analyzing problems and finding solutions) more than the topic itself.
Indeed. And the periods in which I can be obsessed seem to be increasingly less common as I get older, but every now and then I get bitten and just have to bang it out.
I don't have the energy to code on private projects for eight hours after eight hours of coding at work (besides occasionally enjoying not sitting in front of a monitor...). But every once in a while it bites me to blow 10 hours of tinkering on some strange useless problem, like simulating Logic-Gates with basic arithmetic.
It is very common for professional athletes and for anyone who wants to live off their art (painters, musicians, writers, etc). Most academic types I know are like that too.
There are plenty of programming jobs where 40hs a week is enough and you get paid a good salary.
Now, if you want to join a FAANG, that's a different story. But no one wins a Grammy by playing exclusively in weddings either.
> No dentist gets told he gotta setup a practice in his garden shed to practice pulling teeth
This is a weird argument to me, the medical field has an even more unhealthy work/life balance than our field. They absolutely "practice at home" (obviously not through home surgery, but reading and so). Dentists have an easier time than most other medical professions, but every dentist I've met regardless had extremely good work ethic and frequently obsessed over his work.
You can absolutely work 40hrs a week and be a good engineer business-wise. However, most people who are remembered for their contributions to a field (and weren't just in the right place at the right time) dedicated a large part of their life to it. That includes writers, poets, musicians, doctors, anything.. to quote old Onion videos: are tests biased against students who just don't give a shit?
The thought that some devs are more respectable skill-wise because they hack in their free time is short sighted.
You literally have 8 hours a day to experiment and try all you want, everyday you have the opportunity to learn, hone your skills and experiment and good companies actually have days dedicated to experimenting.
Obviously you can't get great at this job if you don't bang your head on problems for days, but I fail to see that's a quality of recreational programming.
The best advice is to get a proper CS or Engineering degree honnestly.
There's a blog post that I really like titled "Find The Hard Work You're Willing To Do" - http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018... (HN post w/ 76 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541 )
The article concludes with...
> But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles.
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
> I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more compelling motivational poster than "What hard problems do you enjoy working on?" (and even that's a lot better than "What kind of pain are you willing to endure?"), but it might give some people a more realistic way to approach finding their life's work.
---
A lot of people don't have the pain tolerance for the "this isn't fun" part of software development that is necessary to get past certain plateaus of skill.
1. It is very useful to let people know that the first ~500 hours of programming are the worst (not unusual for hard skills). I've seen now successful developers reduced to scream crying by the feelings lack of agency and overwhelming complexity during this period. Knowing it gets better can help them push through this phase.
2. Many people capable of being good developers respond badly to "Go build something you want to build!" because they don't actually want to build things, or the things they want to build are too outside their skill range and they feel disempowered. Giving someone a list of projects to do and textbooks to work through can be much more effective for certain people (like myself!).
Code spells, a game on steam has some of that benefit, but nothing I jave seen since has been quite as accessible as quakeC
Wow, I have never seen this.
It’s mostly people taking online courses and building the projects in those courses. They’ll do a few different courses and build up maybe 10-15 smaller projects before tackling something they want to build.
It matters very little whether it's linear programs, ASM instructions, LISP forms or C++ classes.
I generally don't teach coding to newbies, so a lot of the coding I teach is correcting poor mental models and teaching features (somewhat) unique (or different) in Python.
My best Pandas courses have been when the client opts to use their data for the course (instead of my canned data). The students are already subject matter experts with the data and when they learn some of the tricks to slice and dice, summarize, and visualize, they are off to the races. They dig right in.
Teaching as the article suggests is very difficult because examples that appeal to some or boring or confusing to others. I'm not saying it won't work, but there are cons as well. When I'm teaching with my "canned data", I try to mix in a few different datasets from different areas so students can see that the ideas are generally adaptable.
This is still how i learn (most effectively) today. If i want to learn a new language or something, i write something that i always wanted to write in it anyways. That way it doesn't get boring.
I think what you're describing might be similar in that canned-data is not interesting.
Do such kids need to start with regular programming languages? Wouldn't visual languages be a simpler starting point for them to get motivated?
They don't need to start with redstone to learn to code. They should play the game and naturally realize that redstone is a way to solve their problem (like making an automatic sliding 2x2 door) and then solve it.
I feel like those skills will take you much further in life because now you have an extra tool to solve problem no matter what field you end up going into. And since programming is so powerful, it's often one of the best tools for the job so kids will naturally pick it up.
But.... I can finally program.
But you will do better teaching-wise if you do find something that has intrinsic motivation, not turning it into a chore.
It just might not be the right time! They've basically got until they are 18-20ish to decide to get into it. The programming books my parents gave me after 8th grade never interested me. The 11th grade programming class didn't either. The junior year of college tangentially-related course where I was like "oh I could write a program to help with this homework!" That did the trick for me.
So just keep trying, see if you can find programming-related aspects of other hobbies. And just try to focus on them learning things around those hobbies or obsessions, even if it doesn't seem to have a practical application. Get in the habit of going deep on subjects and practicing learning.
And more than that, you need to have a concept of the difficulty of a given problem for a beginner or expert. Obviously a beginner will be wildly off, but probably needs some concept of the level of difficulty.
For example, lots of people have motivation to write a game. But few have the level of obsession to follow through with it. Maybe they should do a basic iPhone convenience app or something first instead.
I thought writing a C++ compiler would be just some new keywords and member functions, and would take 3 months.
10 years later...
If the goal is to release a complete product, then you're right that that's a problem. However, if the goal is learning, half a game is a great way to learn about a variety of systems and how to program for them!
I'll explain: many piano teachers won't take adult beginners, purely because they have unrealistic ideas of how good they're going to be. They want to play a Chopin Etude or the Goldberg Variations or a Brahms Intermezzo, and don't want to spend time struggling with Clementi.
Well, sorry. You won't be that good for a long, long time, if ever. It could be that some beginning programmers also have wild ideas of doing a game as good as GTA, all by themselves.
If you're picking up basketball at age 30, I hope you know that you're never going to be anywhere nearly as good as Curry, or Lebron. But you can definitely pick up a subject matter and become an expert later in life. Heinrich Schliemann essentially began his archeological career at age 36 and yes, basically excavated Troy in the worst way possible, but managed to actually excavate Troy. That's the difference between an adult piano learner and an adult code learner, I think.
Well, I hope so, too. However, in basketball, the really good players aren't even going to let you play with them, so you're forced to play with people your own level. In music, you're constantly hearing 8-year-olds who are better than you will ever be.
I believe it's the motor skills, and the plasticity of the brain. Personally, I memorize pieces with no effort at all, but sight reading is a bitch for me and always will be.
Lots of parents think it's important for their kids to learn music, actually, with no thought that they'll become professionals. In fact, most of them would be horrified if that happened.
But one time I saw the student list for the kids. Every single one was Chinese.
It's full of PLPs (Pedantic Little People, or you can substitute a different P-word for "people"). And why is it full of PLPs? They get little brownie points for answering, and when you get to certain levels, then you're allowed to do even more! So they compete with each other and downvote your answer for, well, pedantic reasons.
I suppose this site has some of that, but it's not nearly as obnoxious.
Anyhow: I finally found a teacher who played standards, and actually studied with George Shearing! But they're few & far between.
But yeah, conservatories are definitely that. "You, too, can get an expensive education and then struggle to compete with 200 other kids just like you for the the very few paying gigs in classical music!"
The problem was that about 95% of my students didn't have a program they wanted to create. Some just wanted a hobby. Some wanted a better job. Some wanted to do a startup and manage a team, but they didn't really know what kind of startup to do. One guy joined because he made discord bots and thought node.js was cool, but learning loops started to get boring for him.
https://www.metasnake.com/blog/learn-python-2021.html
[1]: https://justjavascript.com/ [2]: https://css-for-js.dev/
It can be quite fun to implement a simple data structure (tree, queue, etc.). in C and bind it to Python.
Otherwise, you can get a lot of dirty details by reading the source to complicated/magical libraries (e.g. pickle).
I was struggling to find why does a = [1, 2, 3] a = b b = b + [1] return a different value as compared to b += [1]
Looking into the source code, everything became clear. The + operator returns a pointer to a new list np containing all the elements from a and b, while += merely appends and returns a pointer to the original list
Feel that's sentiment get more now - it's *not* magic but the fact that everything works given it's all illusions is magical
Why thanks for asking yes I do: I recommend my book, Illustrated Guide to Python 3 [0].
Yes, I teach "professional" Python programmers who lack a lot of the fundamentals. It is so easy to get my with Stack Overflow style of programming these days. (Plus a lot of my students don't want to be "programmers" they use Python as tool to get some job done.)
0 - https://store.metasnake.com/
True, but teaching s programming language is different than teaching programming.
Diving into a new language is something you do if you already understand how computers work and how to turn requirements into code. But to first acquire that understanding as a beginner, it's not enough to be introduced to the specifics of any particular language, which is what the article is talking about; you need to clarify what is the role of a programmer in understanding a problem and finding ways to model it as a group of data structures and functions that live in the computer.
I've never understood the modern theory that one can master a subject yet not be able to answer questions about it.
Lots of passing of tests from short-term memorization that's then promptly forgotten.
And yes, doing column buckling problem sets in college enabled me to size the jackscrew for the 757, as it was a column buckling problem.
Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history? Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C?
(The flip side of this is folks I've worked with who will immediately say "this is the Command Pattern" or such and jump to writing a bunch of code that either is massive overkill and/or just breaks down when the real world introduces some edge cases.)
As for checking a reference, I knew that "column buckling" was a thing. Before I studied it, I didn't know the concept even existed, and would have no idea how to look up something I didn't even know existed or what it might be called.
> Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history?
How are you going to understand WW1 without knowing who Ludendorff was? I know that if you don't know names and dates and events, you cannot have a mastery of history. You don't have any framework to hang analysis or understanding on.
> Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions
Nobody does that. But I will say that if you can't name any of them, I guarantee you don't know squat about C.
> and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C?
I wonder how many C experts you know can't answer a question about what a pointer is.
Like the companies that will help you leave as a customer because at least you leave with a good feeling and might come back, versus the companies which make it hard so you hate them forever. Experts go round Internet forums with a “fuck off lazy noob” attitude then wonder why the forum is in decline and empty with only noobs traffic, and then blame it on the noobs, because they are overrunning the site and that must be driving the “good people” out.
Mentoring and individual communication happens all over, but it looks like “doing their homework for them” which is verboten.
If they don’t learn from your answers, you might, other readers might.
The fix for “eternal September” is not “duplicate question” it’s that the older questions and answers need to be deleted, forgotten. The important bit is the development of ideas in the questioner and answerer, not the production of paperwork.
I suspect there is room for a huge forum/site based around these ideas that would combine collaborative editing, live examples, questions, and push new people not on “how to ask a good question” but “how to engage in a back and forth discussion” in some way.
This has been a disjointed blog post in a comment.
Would you rather work with someone who added a major subsystem to one of your compilers for fun or someone who had never coded but could recite the ISO standard by heart? Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”?
If measurements tend to become targets over time then the goal of “develop expertise” measured by “pass a test” shifts to a goal of “pass the test”, and the test is limited to what you can ask hundreds of students in a couple of hours, and they’ve seen practise papers and last year’s papers and you can’t talk to them, and you can’t see them work or the results of their work.
Is that then a good way, to develop and validate their expertise? Is it the best available way?
All the people who believe that "teaching the test" is not real knowledge.
For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar? How about consult a physician who couldn't pass his medical boards? How about get on an airplane with a pilot who flunked flight school, but "really knows how to fly"?
And yes, there are bad tests. But there are also good tests, and they work. Personally, I've never encountered a person who mastered a topic but couldn't get a good grade in it.
In your examples all those people never got to practice their craft. Lawyers can't practice law without a bar, physicians can't perform surgery without a medical license, etc. But software development isn't like that. What if there was a surgeon who has completed 10,000 successful surgeries but never went through med school? What if there was a lawyer who won major cases with no law degree? Or a commercial pilot who successfully flew for years on a fraudulent license and only stopped flying because he got caught? (That last one actually happened a few months ago).
If you could choose, would't you pick the surgeon with a wildly successful track record over the recently graduated med school student who has never done a surgery outside of residency?
Most of them are too dead to continue to work, and the rest usually get fired if the crash was due to pilot error.
And no, I don't believe you're going to fly with a pilot who flunked out of flight school.
No, I wouldn’t fly with a pilot who flunked out of flight school, but I would certainly fly with a pilot who’s flown for 10 years without a license over a pilot with a brand new PPL and <2000 hours flight experience.
Maybe for better perspective we can try this exercise: let’s say there’s a world renowned brain surgeon in, say, Norway who has worked for decades and performed tens of thousands of surgeries. No mistakes! Tens of thousands of happy stories!
But wait. Our intrepid surgeon can’t practice in the US because she didn’t go to medical school here! If she wanted to operate on a patient in the US mainland, she’d lose to a doctor who just exited residency!
If you were the patient who needed brain surgery, who would you pick? The world renowned expert or the guy who just finished training? Your logic dictates that the guy with the credentials wins out for no reason other than they went through whatever process to obtain those credentials, regardless if there are better metrics or methods to judge occupational success by.
That's not my position. My position is if he was that good, he would pass the medical examinations.
> pilot
I'm not a pilot, but my dad was, other family members are, and I worked at Boeing designing the 757. Actually flying an airplane is rather simple. Most of pilot training is about handling an emergency.
These days, emergencies in the air are very rare. You may never have one in a career. But if you do have one, trying to learn how to deal with it on the job is a good way to die.
If someone really did fly 10,000 hours, but still cannot pass the certification test, he's a fool and you're a fool to fly with him.
Also, please do not confuse "did not take the test" with "flunked the test".
P.S. I have some training materials my dad had to learn. You're not going to learn that stuff by just flying around. Much of it is things that are learned about the airplane by expert test pilots, like how fast can you fly it without tearing the airplane apart. Do you think a pilot ought to know that speed before he gets in the cockpit? How about questions like how much runway do you need with a specific amount of airplane gross weight and altitude of the runway? I remember getting on a plane in Colorado and the pilot threw our luggage out, saying it was too much weight for the altitude, and it would arrive with the next flight. Do you want to fly with the pilot who couldn't make such computations? It doan' matter how good at flying he is if the airplane won't lift off the runway.
It's not about hiring a lawyer who flunked the bar. It's more like, how many lawyers are bad lawyers despite passing the bar.
I don't know about law specifically, but in my experience a lot of people who pass tests don't have deep understanding. Vice versa may also be true depending on the test.
That 5% of tests are rigorous and accurately identify squares is not really something I question, but I might question that the people who pass them were "taught to take the test" and nothing else.
(Would you say 7 years of degree, medical school, hospital residency, rotation around departments, counts as "teaching to the test", i.e. "an unhealthy focus on excessive repetition of simple, isolated skills ("drill and kill") [which] limits the teacher's ability to foster a holistic understanding of the subject matter."? - from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test )
It's the other way which is in question, "if you can answer questions, does that mean you definitely have expertise?". Is being able to answer questions the same as having expertise? Are there people who CAN answer questions but have no expertise? If so, how many?
Referencing your other pilot comment, is being able to say what action you should take in an emergency, the same thing as having the calmness and presence of mind and judgement to actually take that action in an emergency instead of locking up and forgetting and panicking? Certainly the pilot who does act well in an emergency could tell you about it, but can all the people who can tell you about it, do it?
Putting it in terms of logic, (A implies B) does not mean that ((not A) implies (not B)).
I passed German at school, despite being unable to speak German. Anybody who spoke German could have tried to have a conversation with me and see that I couldn't, that would be a good way to judge my supposed skills. Any test which is not that, any test which is a proxy to that, or a way to judge that with less effort, is worse than doing that. Teaching me to answer the questions they were going to ask on German grammar, or recite the sentences they were going to expect me to recite, is even worse.
Of course people with absolutely no skill fail tests more than random, who would question that.
Motivation is the primary hurdle when teaching folks how to code. Having a goal to accomplish keeps them motivated, especially if there's feedback early - games, robots are good starting points.
> If you’ve read any of the introductory Processing textbooks or taken a class on programming with Processing (and hopefully you’ve done one of these things to help prepare you for this book)
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a beginner book at all.
I only began to understand the thinking needed for doing my job after after mentoring by a consultant who fully grasped and could communicate this, where all the other in-house seniors were too stuck in the Complex for whatever reason to transmit this clearly (likely related to the near-unihibited freedom the consultant had relative to the in-house seniors).
If there is a large enough market share for a topic grouping like learners together can be very efficient.
Creating a one sized fits most solution is the default setting for many educators and yields an "okay" result.
Allowing learning at your own pace, with community support and many styles of consumable content will give a excellent result for self motivated individuals.
Students who are not motivated or need help with motivation can be handled differently.
Edit:
Learning styles has a broad meaning more than just the "I'm a visual learner."
The myth of different sensory orientations to learning is definitely, well, a myth; it is probably not justified to go beyond that and say everyone learns best with the same pacing and other details of approach.
The linked article describes the structure of a reference book, identifies it as a structure suitable for a reference and those with significant experience, and then decries it as a tutorial for newbies. It seems rather obvious - I wouldn't try learning a new language by reading a dictionary either. It doesn't support the hyperbole in the title. There are many good tutorials for learning to code in different programming languages, sometimes it's hard to pick them out though.
What works for me, and pretty much everybody I've watched try to learn anything, is a simple loop. Conceptual explanations (whether written, verbal, or visual), applying the concepts with exercises / practice / work with examples to follow, digging into the details using a reference, and then broadening to the next set of concepts. Eventually the pattern recognition kicks in and people can see the connections and predict the rest.
I certainly agree with the author's main point. Giving people a series of dry lectures or chapters that focus on syntax, without any intentional narrative about what it all means or why we should learn it is not particularly effective.
I'll make a brief comparison to the math materials I've reviewed for secondary education. There are many curriculum resources that are really well structured mathematically - all the math is correct, and each new topic builds on previous topics coherently, and leads somewhere specific in the end. But most of these kinds of resources are fairly dry to students who are not intrinsically motivated to learn math. Then there are many resources that present things in a fun or interesting way, but lack a coherent structure to the math that's presented. These are better at catching students' interest, but they still don't bring students to a place where they understand math well enough to use it effectively in their own lives. There are few curriculum resources that truly do a good job of hitting both of these goals - well structured mathematically, and with compelling topics. It's difficult because the people creating the resources need a really strong pedagogical background and a really strong mathematical background. People often tend to focus on one or the other of these areas.
I see the same issue in how learning resources are developed for programming. There are probably thousands of books that have a table of contents similar to what the author presents here, without a coherent narrative to motivate people through all those topics. Many of these books are technically sound, but they don't carry people through all the topics because there's too little tying all the topics together. Then there are a whole bunch of resources that use a specific compelling topic to grab people's attention; the author uses the example of card games. There are a couple limitations here: if you pick an interesting context, you only appeal to the people who like that subject. Also, you then have to stretch the context to cover concepts that aren't specifically needed for that context. That is, building a card game project brings up many topics and ties them together. But what do you do with important topics that weren't needed? Do you leave them out? Do you present them separately? Do you force them into the context?
One of my big frustrations with learning resources, especially k-12, is that they do a great job of grabbing kids' attention. We've kind of solved that problem - young people are plenty interested in learning to code. But to really gain the ability to build out your own ideas, you need to work through the list of topics that the author of this article presents.
What's the conclusion? There's no one way to teach people to code. We need a variety of resources that address all of these issues in ways that meet the needs of a variety of learners. People who are designing these resources, whether they're developing a book, video course, online tutorial, etc, need to think through these issues and have a clear and intentional approach to how their resource is structured.
The tutorial market is different than the computer science 101 crowd, so you have tutorials for one, textbooks for the other.
The issue with using tutorials in textbooks is that it's more effective to use 1 great example per chapter, than shoe-horn 1 monolitic project as an example for 13 chapters. And the three CS 101 books I've read do have good examples or interesting problems to solve. If I remember correctly the Harvard 101 book does use cards for objects.
One problem that the Ruby on Rails tutorial has as a CS 101 book is that there is so much boiler-plate stuff needed to have a functioning monolithic example. To do "hello world", need Database -> Code -> Template... when you can do: print("hello world"), then move on to next chapter.
The article is much-ado about nothing.
What's annoying about those books is that sometimes you don't care to go through the entire project, you just want to jump to a specific topic, but you're forced be part of a continuous narrative. Though in modern times where every technical book has a corresponding repository somewhere with code samples, you can at least use that code rather than starting chapter one.
Whether you want to learn from how-to projects, or from abstract first principles, there's resources out there for both. Teaching how to code is not broken at all. Maybe teaching data structures and algorithms could use more work- but that's the subject for a different article.
I see the following as the biggest unsolved problems:
1. Online learning rarely teaches you what you should be learning. Resources are useless if you don't know which subject matter is right for you yet. 2. Platforms don't give you a feel for "completion", e g. when and how should I start job searching. 3. You don't get personal mentorship or cohort support like you would at school 4. Too many videos, not enough code. Almost all learning when it comes to coding should include writing code. 5. Healthy mix of guided and unguided learning. Courses are great for abstract concepts, projects need to follow so that you can apply what you learn on your own
I wish the style of teaching complex programming topics walked me through the pain of making something work, exploring a few alternative solutions, showing the tradeoffs, and then after the pain has been experienced by the learner, a proper solution is finally introduced and recommended. IMO it's a much more powerful technique for teaching if you walk the learner through the pains first, then arrive at a solution, and tell them that "you've just [discovered how ownership works in rust]"; i.e. the concept is given a name at the _very end_, not defined at the beginning as a solution to a pain the learner never experienced. Unfortunately very few books/tutorials take this approach.
I don’t think the order of teaching presented in the article as bad actually is bad. What I think the problem I and others had is learning from a book to start with is really hard. Stuff doesn’t get retained well or make sense.
Programming finally clicked for me when I did the codeacademy class for JavaScript in 2012. What helped was it wasn’t just shoving walls or text at me. It was “here is a very tiny concept, go try it. Now here is another tiny concept, try this”
When I used to give coding interviews one of my favorite tasks was to implement the scoring rules of poker[1]. People would often ask "why ask them about poker?" and I'd show them that there is a ton of skill coverage
1. Decomposition of requirements into sub problems
2. pattern matching for code reuse and composition
3. seeing if they can come up with a decent algorithm to communicate to and from sub functions the results
4. seeing if they can come up with an ordering mechanism for cards
5. seeing if they can come up with a for loop that counts if there are 5 of something
6. String parsing to their own intermediate representation of cards
All these skills are used basically daily (at least in my workplace)
[1]: a good description of the rules, sample IOs, and myself as an oracle (ask me anything, no expectation of knowing poker itself) served to help keep "poker" from being the subject matter tested
I hear your point, I guess my point is that serious measures are taken to dampen the difference between someone who knows poker and someone who doesnt. I've actually found largely candidates do not know the game so the calibrated comparisons is mostly between people who don't know the game.
Crib may actually be a better option -- the more esoteric the game, the less pre-knowledge plays a factor.
Edit: also NB: the only part that was to be implemented was the relative rank of a hand (ie, which hand won) . So the analogous equivalent in the crib example would be just the scoring of each hand.
Starting from high card on gets to some interesting increasingly complex "can I identify it rules"
!@! SPOILER BELOW !@!
!@! SPOILER BELOW !@!
high card -> sort cards by value return cards[4]
Count cards (map[value]->int) --> Pair, pairs, triples, four of a kind
For each card is first token match? --> flush
sort cards , card[0] == card[4] + 4? --> straight
straight flush --> straight && flush
royal flush --> highcard == A && straight && flush
It's been common for a decade now to recommend beginners on the internet looking for an intro to CS the course Harvard CS50. The course has attracted criticism for be overwhelming for a single semester, as it requires submitting assignments in Scratch, C, Python, SQL, and HTML/JS. However, I think it, like other well-acclaimed intro to CS courses do teach problem solving in via hand-held labs and problem sets. Perhaps its prevalence suggests the course is influential in the way CS is taught, but outside of Yale copying the course, I'm not sure.
I think the problem sets in CS 50 are effective for teaching problem solving. Looking at examples of problem sets for the most recent semester (I did the Fall 2012, so it's changed a bit) there is...
- making an animation or game in Scratch which must have have a loop, condition, and variable - printing pyramids of # characters - caesar encryption - ballot counting - implementing bitmap image filters - a spell checker - writing SQL queries against a database of movies - writing the frontend of a website - writing a basic full-stack web app
I guess the main difference between the course and the post's proposal is that it doesn't follow a single narrative, so when you apply concepts in your head is only after the first introduction.
Looking on other resources I encountered at Georgia Tech, I remember both the intro to CS class I saw others take and the cool, interactive intro to CS textbook Mark Guzdial showed my class How to Think Like a Computer Scientist [1]. They both start with python turtle graphics towards the beginning to teach variables and loops before venturing off into other concepts. I think the first half of Automate the Boring stuff with Python actually faces the issues the author cites before diving into common applications in the second half; I do wonder now many working professionals learned from this text which I've generally liked at a glance. I suppose the most influential intro to CS materials are for AP CS A, although I'm not familiar with the course.
[1] https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published//thinkcspy/inde...
1 was along the lines of what was on the top of this article: Chapter 1: Types Chapter 2: Variables Chapter 3: Operators/Math Chapter 4: Control structures Chapter 5: Arrays Chapter 6: Functions Chapter 7: Structs Chapter 8: Classes and Objects Chapter 9: Methods Chapter 10: Inheritance and Polymorphism
And 2 was algorithms (sorts, etc)
Then the Java class was: Chapter 1: Types Chapter 2: Variables Chapter 3: Operators/Math Chapter 4: Control structures Chapter 5: Arrays Chapter 6: Functions Chapter 7: Structs Chapter 8: Classes and Objects Chapter 9: Methods Chapter 10: Inheritance and Polymorphism
But not much about what you can do in Java specifically.
I understand going over these concepts briefly and how to do them specifically in that class, but to have the whole class focus on them was not very useful. Again, 101 was a PREREQUISITE! So there shouldn't be anyone in the class who hasn't taken it!