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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?"
The important thing about learning to code is keeping interest/motivation to do so.
I agree with the general approach that the essay espouses - whimsy is a great way to keep interest; but it's certainly not the only way. Different things work for different people. My daughter is two and a half years old, and so far has totally rejected learning that involves traditional 'reward' such as the way gCompris shows 'happy' images on completing tasks vs 'sad' images when failing. However, what seems to do it for her is being able to 'show off'. When she can make her grandmother surprised by being able to point out letters of the alphabet on things, she is much more motivated to learn and get it right.
I'm sure my daughter's learning style will develop and change as she grows; I just wanted to use an example that demonstrates not everyone is motivated to learn in the same way. I don't think coding is any different.
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I like to learn this way better than that way therefore this way is better.
Yes, for you. That way may better for others perhaps even most.
Hello! I see you are trying to create an array which is bigger than the RAM on your computer. Would you like me to order additional RAM on amazon.com for you at the cost of USD$5,452,981,583 or would you rather create a 1 petabyte swap file on your 3 terabyte hard drive? - Clippy
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PHP is a much, much better choice! Everything just fucking works, even when some parameters are wrong and you're mixing variable types all over the place. /duck
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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...
1. A toolset they can use to build useful projects
2. A language they can grasp easily
3. And a genuinely useful project they can achieve
Everyone's best coding experiences have come from a desire to do something, combined with the right tools to achieve it. In the early days of 8-bit computing and BASIC, this was about making a game where the computer said "I've thought of a number between 1 and 1,000", and then you guessed and it told you you were too high or too low.
When you got that going, that was an extraordinary sense of achievement. "Look ma! I've made a simple game, you can enjoy!"
And then came Windows and complex APIs, and languages like Visual Basic that abstracted too much from the users, such that much that happened was 'magic'. Who - given a computer these days - begins to think "how do I *make* something amazing?"
Fortunately, things are getting better. The right languages are now available - most notably Python, Lua and Ruby - all of which are proper programming languages, but which are also easy to learn.
And the Raspberry Pi project comes from the right place. The issue it has, perhaps, is that people don't want to produce Raspberry Pi apps - and that desktop apps for Linux, whether written in Ruby, Python or anything else, are hardly childs play.
A better option for deploying a *real* app, people want to use, a modern equivalent of the guess the numbers game, must be either an app for a smart phone, or it must be a web app which can be deployed (for free) in the cloud. In which case, I think there are two or three options. (There used to be more, but Heroku Garden is no more). For smartphone development, Corona SDK is fairly mature and works with both Android and iOS. For a web app, there are a few more options, of which PythonAnywhere is probably the best of the bunch.
I suspect a decade from now, the self-taught developers will have mostly learned their craft in one of these languages, building useful apps for smartphones or the web.
--- My dad's political betting
Everything just fucking works, even when some parameters are wrong and you're mixing variable types all over the place. /duck
That's probably because you're a "duck"-typing programmer.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
My understanding is that management only hires people who have fun doing their job because management is largely made up of Funpires who need to slowly leech the fun out of their victims, leaving them soulless corpses.
Seriously, why else would they veto Pants-Free Fridays?
When I hire a programmer, my first goal is to find out how much fun they have coding. Without that, I don't hire them.
Translation: I want someone to work his ass of to the bone for shitty pay because he loves it.
I USED to love to code. Then after about 4 -5 years of the 55 -60 hour work weeks to meet the deadlines set by sales and having to keep up with technology at home (more coding), I just got to the point of disliking it. Burnt out.
BUT - I get the specs: I get the job done - on time. And then go home to the family and my tennis game. I work to live: NOT live to work. I have balance in my life and I'm MUCH happier.
Having someone "Love" it is like dating in high school - they're out of love at the end of the Summer.
I talked to career councilors, they told me to stay in development/computers; so it's not me, it's the screwed up industry and its idiotic notions of what makes a "good" programmer and employee.
Perhaps if folks promoted folks who actually have grown up and gotten beyond the adolescent idea of "you are what you do" and "you must have passion" that maybe there would be changes in the working conditions.
A good programming language is not one that is full of fucking "whimsy". A good programming language has a clear, concise set of commands which are self documenting. It should be difficult to write the same, simple function in multiple ways. Ruby fails on all accounts. The wording is inconsistent, there are about 45million different ways to write any given function which also means it is hardly self documenting.
I've rarely met a Ruby developer who was employable in another field because they simply don't know what constitutes good, clean, concise code.
I've got karma to burn...
Perhaps the most soul crushing phrase you will ever hear as a programmer is: "Don't re-invent the wheel."
Go ahead, re-invent that wheel every now and then. That's why you got into programming in the first place. You can do a better job.
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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These three are the key to motivation in many activities. Without fun it's hard to get started, without joy it's hard to keep going, and only later do you see the beauty, first hand, that you can achieve through really mastering a discipline.
John_Chalisque
I had much the same reaction to perl. I love perl for many reasons. One is that even though the native language without any imports is more powerful than almost any other languange (without imports) the O'reily nut shell guide is the thinest one on my shelf. It really says something about incomprehensibility when even the C++ nutshell guide is thicker than perl. It means that even though perl might seem very ad hoc, in fact it's so self consistent that you can write it all up in a tiny guide.
What really sold me on perl was writing object oriented perl. I had been doing object oriented programming for some time in multiple languages including java and Objective C, but what really made me understand it was perl. In perl you actually see the underside magic of what an object actually is. It's remarkable that the language of perl could go from not having any objects to having objects just by adding one additional command ("bless"). Nothing else in the language had to be re-written. Internally one is storing all the instance variables in a single hash. What's interesting is that you don't have to choose that mode of data organization. you can instead bless a scalar. then you can have the class rather than the instance manage the instance variables. Effectively a hash is a row oriented data base and a scalar is a column oriented data base. When I realized this I was sort of staggered how many high concept ideas were rolled up into the perl method of objects.
I went back and implemented a hash in fortran 77. After that I could write Object oriented fortran 77. yep that's right fortran can also be an object oriented language just doing the same trick perl does. All you then are missing is dynamic memory allocation for it to be complete.
While may people curse perls prefix sigils I actually find them conceptually compact. In most languages the notion of a type, and the construction of a primitives data, get conflated. Really these are different things. Perl makes this explicit. A primitive in perl can have a data organization (list, hash, scalar, reference, dereference, glob) signified by a pand it can separately have a package inheritance (@ISA) that is analogous to a type. In languages like C++ or most everything those two concepts are not distinguised heavily. As a result I find it easier to read a perl program because of all the explicit data structure prefixes.
What kills perl in the end for complex programs is not these sigils looking like cursing on the page, but rather that everyones programming style is different, so it gets pretty crazy to read because it's so compact. It's perhaps a compliment how compact it is. It's interesting that the less compact and less versatile a languages native syntax is the easier it is to read.
But it's true. Try reading APL, the most dense language ever devised. then try reading Lua or (early) python. Both of those are a breeze to read other people's code.
When I read ruby what I see mainly is an extended perl syntax that can avoid using these despised prefix sigils. It gives the objects syntacic sugar, like python does, to hide the object mechanics from you. So it's a very clean looking upgrade to perl.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
I've been a professional software developer for nearly 25 years now, and did it for fun for about 10 years prior to that. I'm old and jaded, and before this morning I thought I had come across every way in which a well-meaning person can make a computer program difficult to maintain.
Thank you more than words can express for restoring my sense of wonder in the universe today.