Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Slashdot Asks: How Did You Learn How To Code?

Posted by EditorDavid on from the getting-an-A-in-C+ dept.

Last week Apple's CEO argued that computer programming should be a 'second language', and that it should be a required subject for all students starting in 4th grade. But a large number of professional programmers didn't learn how to code in a formal school program, either because they're self-taught or because they learned on the job. There's a lot of abstract discussions about the best ways to teach coding, but if there's any group that's uniquely qualified to answer that question, it's the Slashdot community.

So leave your answers in the comments. How did you learn how to code?

3 of 515 comments (clear)

  1. The usual way by russotto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That is, the usual way for 1980s computer geeks. Self-taught BASIC on an Apple II using a few books on Applesoft and Integer BASIC. Later Pascal also on the Apple II with a few books including Jensen and Wirth's PASCAL User Manual and Report. Learned C (K&R, mind you, none of that prototype crap) on a Mac XL with the old Megamax compiler. Picked up 6502 assembler out of necessity in there, also 68000 and 6809.

    1. Re:The usual way by Moblaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because back in the 1980s computers booted to the BASIC command line interpreter/REPL. Nowadays, there is, more or less, no such thing. Closest similar thing most non-geeks will get to is a browser console, and while that is reasonable debugging tool for pros, it's not a similarly friendly programming tool for beginners.

      In fact, you practically need to be an experienced developer even to get a modern IDE up and running. Eclipse? Xcode? Not for the faint-hearted.

      Not sure about hard statistics, but I'd say it's a safe bet most new developers these days need to be shown how to get going. Beyond that, they'll naturally self-teach and bootstrap themselves, or fail out early. Because at the end of the day, no matter how you learn, your practical knowledge (meaning libraries and frameworks and tools, if not entire languages) will be functionally obsolete within two years, formal CS concepts and emacs/vim godliness notwithstanding.

  2. Coding, or programming? by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I learned to code first in classes in high school (BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal) and then by reading the relevant books or documentation (C, C++, Lisp, Icon, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Javascript et. al.).

    The more interesting question is where developers first learned to program (a completely different skill from coding). IMO we don't need to teach children to code, we need to teach them to program. Which means first teaching them to approach problems logically and analytically, which is going to cause the loss of about 75% (my guesstimate) of the educational establishment when they can't deal with students who know how to analyze material, do independent research and call teachers on incorrect classroom material.