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Learning To Code: Are We Having Fun Yet?
theodp writes "Nate West has a nice essay on the importance of whimsy in learning to program. "It wasn't until I was writing Ruby that I found learning to program to be fun," recalls West. "What's funny is it really doesn't take much effort to be more enjoyable than the C++ examples from earlier...just getting to write gets.chomp and puts over cout > made all the difference. Ruby examples kept me engaged just long enough that I could find Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby." So, does the future of introductory computer programming books and MOOCs lie in professional, business-like presentations, or does a less-polished production with some genuine goofy enthusiasm help the programming medicine go down?"
Seriously? I hated Why's Guide... it was stupid. I'm sorry. Just get to the point. I'd rather have a BNF with some sample code, without the fluff. Lua's documentation was the best I've seen (for introduction to a programming language). Go's is pretty good too.
The author has a point, maybe. I did notice that he was ten years old in the nineties and learned to program after college, meaning he has maybe five years of experience. He may be missing the REASON you name it "XMLReader", not "SusieQ" or whatever he said. If he ever has to grok a medium sized project full of classes with "whimsical" names he may wish for clear, intuitive names.
My predecessor at work was whimsical - every script or class has a variable named "bob", which sometimes is important, sometimes does nothing. Occasionally, he forgot what he was using bob for in a particular function and tried to have it represent two different things. One of our tasks is to slowly replace all of his whimsical code with proper code that is reliable and self documenting
The most fun I've seen people have while learning to program was back in the 90s, when people
learned to program for LPMUDs.
It takes about half a second for someone to understand object oriented programming with inheritance
if they create a key, or a door, or a special sword, or...
And they had so much fun programming. They never wanted to stop.
I wish someone could create a similar 3d MMORPG (with physics) to keep up with the times...
If you want to get into programming then I suggest grabbing an embedded board and by using C and ASM make LED's blink, Make motors spin and make stuff just happen. Nothing will get you hooked faster then seeing your code do useful work. I think that is what is missing from most programming classes.
When I was an undergrad with a part time job helping out in a graduate chemistry lab, there was a suite of utilities written in FORTRAN. People depended heavily on this suite to calculate all manner of things related to their crystallography research.
The problem was, it was mostly written during one of those years where Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit were massively popular again, and people were learning to program with hunt-the-wumpus teletype programs. The original author "amused" himself by naming pretty much anything he could after some fantasy concept. CASTLE, FRODO, DRAGON, and so on. Okay, so to map out van der Waals surface strength, you ran CASTLE. Many things have quirky codenames, you get used to it. But all the variables followed suit. Now it was a bit more obscure to maintain the program or trace the logic.
Worst of all, the comments. In FORTRAN, columns 1 to 72 were for your program, and anything after 73 was a comment. The author wrote an "epic" of his own, all word-wrapped in the column space from 73 to 132 (the width of common teletype paper and long Hollerith punch cards). What a waste of his time, you might think. But it was also a huge impediment to maintenance; you see, people in the lab LIKED his story (for a while), so they had to figure out how to patch the logic without breaking the flow of the story. It took years before someone stripped all the prose and got the rest of the lab to follow the maintainable fork instead o the prosaic one.
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What I've learned from having two young children is that kids have a strong desire for attention. It's amazing when they can satisfy that desire by impressing someone with their intelligence or achievement. This is the exact behavior I try to reinforce. There are a lot of bad ways for children to seek attention as you can imagine, like doing something that gets them in trouble.
I think as kids grow up they may find other ways to gain attention and have other desires besides attention. But what I hope to instill in them at a young age is that people will like you if you can show them you are smart as opposed to showing them you can, I don't know, do something that gets you sent to the principals office.
It's funny what you say about literature. I had a professor in college talking about what B F Skinner meant in a class and a student said, "You're wrong!" He said, "What makes you think I'm wrong?" And the student said, "Because I called B F Skinner and asked him the answers to all these questions."
To his credit the professor (who was actually a really cool guy) said, "Can I have a copy of your paper so I can teach the rest of the class?"
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...