Slashdot Mirror
Do Kids Still Program?
From his journal, hogghogg asks: "I keep finding myself in conversations with tertiary educators in the hard sciences (Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, etc.) who note that even the geeks—those who voluntarily choose to major in hard sciences—enter university never having programmed a computer. When I was in grade six, the Commodore PET came out, and I jumped at the opportunity to learn how to program it. Now, evidently, most high school computer classes are about Word (tm) and Excel (tm). Is this a bad thing? Should we care?" Do you think the desire to program computers has declined in the younger generations? If so, what reasons might you cite as the cause?
Stop it now you'll go blind!
Listen ditch Basic, Perl & PHP they rot your brain. HTML isn't programming. Go pick up a book on lisp, smalltalk or if you must C. Learn principles not implementations. Java is a very poor implementation of smalltalk.
Ditch windows and get some form of *nix on your box. Better yet load up hercules and play with OS/360 or MVS.
Oh and by the way. You're parents are probably right, your friends aren't really, your clothing isn't an original statement, your music is tuneless crap and you are the problem not everybody else.
I got a troll mod, as expected. Just think about that for a second.
Think about how hard it is convince a conformist society, even a microcosm like Slashdot which is supposedly knows full well about the massive amount of information now freely available via IntarWeb to every human on earth, even in the face of interesting evidence, and even in a fully on-topic thread, that school just might be bad for some of us. Think about it REAL HARD (if you still can).
Private School? Chances are if parents found out that Linux was being taught they would ask why resources are spent on that instead of something with real world use. In this case, it's the money of the parents doing the talking. At this point in time what percentage of people (going across all careers) will use linux in the workplace, what, 1%?
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
"Programming" is creating code that, when compiled, produces a binary that needs nothing more than an operating system or JIT compiler to run.
"Scripting" is making funky text documents that need another program to do something. PHP, HTML, and Perl are technically scripting.
For calculators, learn TI-BASIC first, then jump here to learn assembly (assuming you're using a TI-83+/84). It's easier than you'd think, you can write real games with it, and you learn a lot of low level stuff like pointers that makes future programming concepts *much* easier.
For programming, I'd learn Visual Basic .NET. It's simple, .NET lets you make real applications, and introduces some vaguely object-oriented stuff. If you're feeling confident, learn just enough C/C++ syntax and parts of the Standard Template Library to jump into the Win32 API and MFC. There's a bunch of free compilers out there, like Bloodshed, and Microsoft offers trial versions of their Visual Studio compilers, which are actually worth checking out.
For web development, PHP is, in my humble opinion, much better than Perl. However, it's kinda neutered if you don't also learn some MySQL.
Java is an insanely difficult language, especially for those first beginning programming. They take object-oriented programming to a freakish extreme, to the point of avoiding all native data types. Just adding two numbers together and displaying the result is a horrible combination of objects, casting, parsing, and window manipulation. If your school offers C/C++, take it over Java in a heartbeat - it's a more popular language, used more in professional development (especially games), and can teach object-oriented programming *much* better than Java.
DATABASE WOW WOW
My post wasn't an ad hominem; I wasn't saying that your argument was wrong because you're uneducated, but rather that your argument's lack of merit may be a result of your lack of education.
Anyway.
"Anecdotal" here is being used as in the phrase "anecdotal evidence," which is, really, no evidence at all. In other words, no one is denying that Gates, Kamen, et al. did what they did as dropouts; the point you're missing is that a few counterexamples do not disprove a general principle. You can find successful dropouts just as you can find people who survived car crashes because they weren't wearing their seatbelts and were thrown clear of the car, who smoke three packs a day and live to see their great-grandchildren graduate from college, who grow up in poverty but pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become tycoons, who have unprotected sex with hundreds of partners but never catch a disease -- none of which changes the reality that wearing your seatbelt is a good idea, smoking is bad for you, most people who are born poor stay that way, and that careless promiscuity is a really good way to get AIDS.
To put it in more technical terms, any data set of a reasonable size will have outliers. The reason we have a special word for such data is because they're not representative of the way things usually are.
I do have to apologize for my cheap shot above. Lots of highly educated people don't understand this either.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You have to be kidding me. Kids cannot learn to program by learning a toolchain any more than they can learn to program by reading about the 7 habits of highly synergistic junior vice presidents of microsoft. That was/is why the C64 and platforms like it were/are the ideal platform for learning programming. The environment of such a computer is imperative. You can type a command and have that thing happen immediately. POKE $SOMETHING. Pen down; move to x,y. Why they heck would anyone want to learn to program in MS Visual Shitstain 15.1 when they could make something happen. The young programmer who writes uses a computer to move a Lego car is going to have a much more memorable experience than the one who "learns" to instantiate W32SomeClassWithAReallyLongNameThatsHardToReadOnTh eScreen(and, has, forty, two, arguments, and, no, discernable, reason, to, exist);
My post wasn't an ad hominem; I wasn't saying that your argument was wrong because you're uneducated, but rather that your argument's lack of merit may be a result of your lack of education.
Good god. I think you should look up "ad hominem" while you're double-checking the meaning of "anecdotal".
a few counterexamples do not disprove a general principle...any data set of a reasonable size will have outliers.
No sh*t. I'm suggesting that these people are not "outliers".
Ask yourself:
Who are the most creative people?
Who are the most influential inventors?
Who are the most successful self-made women/men?
Then you will see that my list is not anecotal at all, and if you're really honest with yourself you might ask how those people did it in spite of the widely held notion that when it comes to education, more is better.
You seem to take the word to mean something like "unimportant".
No, I know exactly what it means.
Perhaps the flaw is that I assumed that creativity, influence, and self-made wealth are desirable personal achievements. Had I asked instead who is most successful at sitting in neat rows doing exactly what he or she is told for hours on end without asking questions, I surely would have come up with more honest examples.
Most of them don't even have coherent writing skills.
Ahem... *rolls eyes*