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"Learn To Code, Get a Job" According To CNN
An anonymous reader writes "CNN is running an opinion article that talks about Michael Bloomberg's taking part in CodeAdacemy's CodeYear program, which aims to teach average people to learn enough to work as a Software Developer by year end. I'm trying to not be elitist in judging this article and those involved, but I'm curious as to what /. thinks of this questionable plan."
It's what much of the industry has settled for. Just look at any CSS code. Or try designing a website with CSS. I have a little website on the side that I recently did some CSS/Javascript/jQuery/PHP work on, reusing some other code I found and making massive changes to it. As I have lots of experience with assembly, C, C++, and Perl, I usually don't have much trouble learning new languages. On this project, the PHP was easy. The Javascript and jQuery, also not very hard, though not quite as easy as the PHP. HTML wasn't hard of course. But the CSS, for making everything look right, and also doing some simple animations? Holy shit, what a nightmare! I've never seen anything so horribly designed in my life. Doing anything meaningful with it is basically a big hack.
CSS...Doing anything meaningful with it is basically a big hack.
You can thank the browser vendors for that. Many of my design decisions are based on what it's going to take to make it look right in ALL browsers. What works right in one browser, will probably look horrible on others. Mind you, I wrote those sentences to be non-specific - in reality, all but one of the current browsers function in roughly the same manner where CSS is concerned. You can guess which one.
Now, if LESS could become the standard...
"Lame" - Galaxar
If I started coding today I think I would go about it roughly thusly:
1) google "Game coding tutorial HTML5" or similar,
2) Find the code listings, run them, modify them a little to see what happens but eventually be annoyed that I don't really know what the magic incantations in javascript etc mean
3) Google "javascript introduction" and spend some time just writing "Hello world" apps and such, trying to learn basic javascript, until I got bored with that.
4) Return to the game code, be absolutely gratified by discovering I indeed understand a little more of the magic incantations, do a bit more targeted modifications of the code to see if I can actually predict the outcomes at all....until I got bored with what I could do with my current level of understanding and return to the course in basic javascript to learn more (repeat from 3, basically). At some point you may know so much general javascript that you can continue learning more about javascript itself by looking directly at the game code and realize how it must work.
As long as you find some little "loop" like that where you actually have fun all the time while learning, chances are good you will end up knowing quite a lot about how to program.