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A Middle-Aged Writer's Quest To Start Learning To Code For the First Time (1843magazine.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the gotta-start-somewhere dept.

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: The Economist's 1843 magazine details one middle-aged writer's (Andrew Smith) quest to learn to code for the first time, after becoming interested in the "alien" logic mechanisms that power completely new phenomena like crypto-currency and effectively make the modern world function in the 21st Century. The writer discovers that there are over 1,700 actively used computer programming languages to choose from, and that every programmer that he asks "Where should someone like me start with coding?" contradicts the next in his or her recommendation. One seasoned programmer tells him that programmers discussing what language is best is the equivalent of watching "religious wars." The writer is stunned by how many of these languages were created by unpaid individuals who often built them for "glory and the hell of it." He is also amazed by how many people help each other with coding problems on the internet every day, and the computer programmer culture that non-technical people are oblivious of.

Eventually the writer finds a chart of the most popular programming languages online, and discovers that these are Python, Javascript, and C++. The syntax of each of these languages looks indecipherable to him. The writer, with some help from online tutorials, then learns how to write a basic Python program that looks for keywords in a Twitter feed. The article is interesting in that it shows what the "alien world of coding" looks like to people who are not already computer nerds and in fact know very little about how computer software works. There are many interesting observations on coding/computing culture in the article, seen through the lens of someone who is not a computer nerd and who has not spent the last two decades hanging out on Slashdot or Stackoverflow.

29 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. meanwhile, in the kitchen... by ealbers · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Economist's 1843 magazine details one middle-aged writer's (Andrew Smith) quest to learn to cook for the first time, after becoming interested in the "alien" logic mechanisms that power completely new phenomena like oven cooking and effectively make the modern world function in the 21st Century. The writer discovers that there are over 1,700 actively used recipes to choose from, and that every chef that he asks "Where should someone like me start with cooking?" contradicts the next in his or her recommendation. One seasoned chef tells him that chefs discussing what recipe is best is the equivalent of watching "religious wars." The writer is stunned by how many of these recipes were created by unpaid individuals who often built them for "glory and the hell of it." He is also amazed by how many people help each other with cooking problems on the internet every day, and the kitchen chef culture that non-technical people are oblivious of.

    Eventually the writer finds a chart of the most popular recipes online, and discovers that these are Beef,Chicken and Pork. The syntax of each of these recipes looks indecipherable to him. The writer, with some help from online tutorials, then learns how to cook a basic recipe that tastes a lot like orange hair marmalade with small hands. The article is interesting in that it shows what the "alien world of cooking" looks like to people who are not already kitchen nerds and in fact know very little about how the chemistry of cooking works. There are many interesting observations on cooking/chef culture in the article, seen through the lens of someone who is not a cooking nerd and who has not spent the last two decades hanging out on BigCookDot or Potoverflow.

    1. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by sfcat · · Score: 2

      Well written and funny, but I hope you're not proposing that the metaphor holds up.

      Everyone knows that all /. metaphors have to do with cars or libraries of congress.

      --
      "Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
    2. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by johannesg · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I came here to ridicule the article, but you have already done all I could have hoped for and more. Thank you.

      For anyone who thinks it is only computer nerds that speak an 'alien' language full of 'weird terminology', try talking to a builder, a plumber, a farmer, a teacher, or really anyone of any other profession about his work. You'll soon discover that their professions are also full of weird and alien terminology, rituals, and habits that make absolutely no sense to an outsider. The fact that we need words to describe things in our little corner of the world is not strange, it's what every profession does. The difference with us is that everyone uses computers, so everyone gets exposed to our terminology.

      And of course we are also in a unique position of our tools appearing to be magic. I very much doubt any blacksmith ever received a bug report like "I bought an axe for cutting down trees from you. I then tried to cut down a skyscraper, but the axe failed completely at this task. There is a bug in my axe. It should cut down anything I want to cut down." or "I prefer holding the axe by the metal part, since the metal feels smooth and cool. However, the wooden part is terrible at cutting things down. It doesn't even cut grass in this configuration! I think my axe is broken. It should cut properly in every orientation, not just when you are holding the wood part. Some people prefer to hold the metal part, they should be accomodated as well."

      That last one is just about literally a bug report that I received last week. Of course I'm a programmer, not a blacksmith, so nobody bats an eye at it...

    3. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why does the article need ridicule? Here's a middle aged person with no skill in the subject, putting himself through something difficult to a lot of people just to get insight about something, rather than be scared of it.

      Why do you want to ridicule that?

      Compare to the average Slashdotter who whinges about the stupidest programming horrors and refusing to learn anything new or difficult and preferring to remain stuck in whatever they were taught or learnt at the time. Then they ridicule other people who do learn the stuff they refuse to learn, and speaking completely from ignorance.

      Kudos to this person who didn't do that, and actually tried his hand at something completely foreign to him.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    4. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by johannesg · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It needs ridicule because _every_ profession on this planet comes with its own unique, impenetrable terminology, yet somehow computer professionals are the only group always being called out on it. Has there ever been an article about someone being amazed at the number of different tools a carpenter uses? If not, why is an article expressing amazement about the number of programming languages ok? And don't even get me started on legal, financial, or medical professions, where you need a professional just to interpret what the other professionals are saying...

      So yes, it's perfectly fine to ridicule someone who barges in and acts like he is visiting the bloody Morlocks, like we are some sub-human tribe that cannot possibly be expected to hold a normal human conversation. It's idiotic and demeaning.

    5. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Because it's showing a stunning level of ignorance where it can't even express the problem before. Consider someone trying to learn physics in the same way. They don't really indicate the things that they want to understand and are then shocked that brane theory and string theory seem contradictory and each have strong proponents. They went straight to quantum mechanics because they kept asking people 'how do I learn physics' without saying 'I want to understand the path that a ball will travel when I throw it' (or whatever the real problem that they're trying to solve is). Shockingly, the author discovers that a discipline that people devote an entire professional career to learning a fairly small subset of is difficult to pick up in a few hours.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      It's classic Dunning-Kruger. Everything looks hard until you just wade in, and find you can scrape Twitter really easily.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    7. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      That's just amazingly petty.

      The article is amazingly petty. Oh, look at me overcomplicate this thing, it's so complicated. Everyone has jargon and special skills in the thousands. Why don't they call the left and right side of a boat the left and right side? Port and starboard? We don't steer off the side any more, and either side can be the port side. Now multiply me whining about that by twenty and see if it makes an interesting article.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    8. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 2

      The problem with you nerds is that you think he's writing for you. He's not. He's writing for the readers of that publication who are not familiar with what we do. He's establishing to his readers that he's approaching this from where they are - with no idea of what he's about to get into. Articles like that are about telling a story to his readers - in this case a story of how he is trying to get to know a subject - not some boring technical manual.

      If people bothered making their way through the whole article, you'd realize he actually put in effort to learn completely new stuff that the industry thinks is beyond someone his age, let alone start from complete scratch. That is much more can be said by whiny Slashdotters who complain about having to learn new stuff in just their own domain, let alone something completely outside it.

      Seriously, complaining about jargon? There are tons of professional programmers on Slashdot complaining about some language or another to hide their own inadequacies all the time.

      Grow up and realize it's not all about you.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    9. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

      And don't even get me started on legal, financial, or medical professions, where you need a professional just to interpret what the other professionals are saying...

      And yet we "little people" are supposed to read and understand paperbook-thick documents and sign them, binding us to whatever the fuck they say.

      At least with computers, you do not have to understand them, you can just use them.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    10. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You're the reason why nerds get beat up, and I no longer feel sorry about nerds getting beaten up since you're arseholes to people who are trying something new.

      You're not sorry people get beaten up, yet I'm the arsehole?

      When was the last time you tried something completely new and outside of your skillset?

      I'm not taking exception to him trying something completely new, that part is cool. I'm taking exception to him doing something completely trite, whining about jargon and complexity when every field has jargon and complexity. It's whiny and it's hypocritical.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    11. Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen... by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      That's just amazingly petty.

      He started it!

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Dave Barry to the rescue by Krishnoid · · Score: 5, Funny

    I guess some things never change:

    Well, my computer makes my dog look like Albert Einstein. I plugged it in and turned it on, and instead of going to work on my telephone-company letters, it started asking a lot of idiot questions, such as what day it was. So I typed in the following computer program:

    NEVER YOU MIND WHAT DAY IT IS. WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO IS STRAIGHTEN OUT ALL MY FILES AND COME UP WITH A NICE HEALTHY LIST OF MY TAX DEDUCTIONS, TAKING PAINS TO GIVE ME, RATHER THAN THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT, BUT NOT CLAIMING ANYTHING THAT WOULD LAND ME IN THE SLAMMER, IF YOU GET MY DRIFT.

    And the computer said:

    SYNTAX ERROR

    Do you believe that? This machine that doesn't even know what day it is tells me, the paid professional writer, that I have a syntax error.

  3. basic programming by mapkinase · · Score: 2

    is accessible literally to every single person on Earth.

    It's trivial. Even actors can learn it.

    --
    I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
  4. 1843 is a misleading title. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 2

    1843 Magazine is a bi-monthly cultural magazine published by the Economist Group. The Economist began publication in 1843. Unfortunately, managers there are apparently not aware that 1843 is a misleading title.

    Andrew Smith, the author of the article Slashdot is reviewing, seems to have no deep knowledge of technology, and no serious interest in learning. He just wants to write about it. He reminds me of Walter Isaacson, who wrote about Steve Jobs of Apple.

    The Economist magazine has useful articles.

    1. Re:1843 is a misleading title. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Andrew Smith, the author of the article Slashdot is reviewing, seems to have no deep knowledge of technology, and no serious interest in learning.

      And he's getting silly answers because he's asking the wrong question. Asking 'what is the best way to learn to program?' is like asking 'what is the best way of learning to write well?'. Do you want to learn to write news articles, opinion, marketing copy, novels, technical manuals? The answer will be different in each case, with the possible exception that (as with learning to program) you will be told to practice a lot. If you start with the problem that you want to solve, you will get very different answers, but they might actually be useful.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:1843 is a misleading title. by iMadeGhostzilla · · Score: 2

      I picked 2011, a few headlines:

      "Latin America changes its guard: Democracy is happily becoming routine"

      "The long goodbye: China gets ready, cautiously, for new leaders"

      "As the novelty wears off: Things will start to fall apart for Britain’s centre-right coalition government"

      "Powerhouse Deutschland: Germany will increase its influence on the euro-zone economy"

      "Foreign frustrations: Blocked at home, what can Barack Obama achieve abroad?"

  5. Re:"The Economist's 1843 magazine" ahh a good year by The+Fat+Bastard · · Score: 2

    The Economist had a sense of humor about mergers by featuring camel sex on the cover.

  6. Meh, take some college courses by lsllll · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm probably going to get shot down over this and get -1 as troll, but IMAO you cannot make a great programmer unless you've taken some college courses specifically related to computer science. That is in addition to having a passion for problem solving and tinkering with anything and everything. This comes from mostly anecdotal instances of people I have ran into in my over 30 years as a computer programmer.

    Taking courses at a college level teaches you the intricate programming concepts and algorithms. Without taking data structures, assembly, operating systems, OOP, and so on at a college level, you're already at a disadvantage. Can you program a Windows/GTK application without taking those courses? Most likely. Can you write device drivers and system routines? No. "How do I sort this list?" Well, that depends on how fast it needs to be sorted, how much memory you have available, how big the list is, etc. "I'm making a list." Does it need to be an array of structures? Does it need to be a linked list? Does it need to be a doubly linked list? Does it need to be a binary tree? Does it need to be a tree? Most programmers don't have to deal with any of this stuff, but then again most programmers aren't great programmers.

    I have ran into many programmers that didn't get their degree in computer science and didn't take any computer science courses in college, and they all fall in the same level. Mediocre. Again, anecdotal and stereotypical, but I'd wager that it's correct almost all the time.

    My suggestion to the OP would be to (since middle ages is still not too old to become a great programmer, as long as you meet the other criteria of being a tinkerer) take some college courses in computer science. Over 1700 languages doesn't mean shit if you don't understand the concepts of programming (although concepts of something like LISP would be completely different than OOP and other traditional languages). Once you learn the concepts, then the rest is just syntax and concepts specific to the language you're learning, but without the basic concepts, you have no ground to stand on.

    --
    Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
    1. Re:Meh, take some college courses by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      but IMAO you cannot make a great programmer unless you've taken some college courses specifically related to computer science.

      You mean like Boole, Babbage, Lovelace & Turing didn't?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    2. Re:Meh, take some college courses by religionofpeas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have ran into many programmers that didn't get their degree in computer science and didn't take any computer science courses in college, and they all fall in the same level. Mediocre

      Maybe just correlation, not causation. I have a degree in CS, but I mostly I learned programming in my spare time. The fact that I was interested in programming led me to sign up for the education.

      "How do I sort this list?"

      Call the sort() function, usually.

    3. Re:Meh, take some college courses by Waccoon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My experience in college is that academic computer science is completely different than real-world computer science. I learned only math and algorithms in college. Everything else I had to learn on my own in my spare time.

      Granted, my college days were in the early 2000's, and I didn't exactly go to the best school, but all we did back then was algorithms in C. Exclusively. We were also forced to do our work with Emacs and submit our homework to a VAX system using nothing more than a mainframe cheat sheet. If something went wrong, we were stuck. It was confusing and useless to participate unless you already knew what the hell you were doing.

      I learned a HELL of a lot more about real programming after I left college and started to work with other, more experienced people. Then it became more obvious what they were trying to teach us in college, but failing miserably.

  7. Start with the best language... Perl6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Start with Perl6 but first listen to one of Larry Wall's lectures on postmodern programming.

    I'm not going to lie Perl6 is probably the best general purpose programming language in existence right now yet I still feel a childish need to be dismissive because I can't be bothered to take the time to learn it. Even if I did it would mean shit for my "career". Just writing "Perl" on a resume is a death sentence.

    In other words don't ask Slashdot for advice on learning to code. Half the people here think cutting and pasting "JavaScript" and "HTML" from stack overflow is "programming". The other half know their shit and are real snobs about it. They will make fun of you if you don't use a functional language and correctness proofs.

    1. Re:Start with the best language... Perl6 by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 2

      You don't cut and paste from stack overflow. You copy and paste. I doubt all of your assertions now.

  8. Re:Poor author finds out he's a poor coder by The+Fat+Bastard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The average American reads at the sixth or seventh grade level. The Econmist is college level. If you want to improve your reading comprehension, read The Economist or The Wall Street Journal. I wouldn't worry about his coding. His comments might be more readable than most comments by programmers.

  9. Re:Poor author finds out he's a poor coder by c120plus · · Score: 2

    This guy is almost unreadable. And apparently he's a professional author. I shudder to think what his coding attempts will be like.

    Look like you didn't read the article, because the code is provided at the end. While simple, the code looks very readable. Nothing like the unreadable mess you'd expect from a beginner. Of course it helps, that Python forces indention on you so you have to indent your code or it won't run,

  10. Learning code should be a early education requirem by bensch128 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm a professional software programmer/engineer and I shutter to think what might happen if society can't understand how all of the complex computing machinery works. Or gives up because of the overwhelming complexity.

    But seeing articles like this gives me hope. It means that we are successfully simplifying/explaining the really difficult bits and allowing more creativity to be layered on top of the complex parts. The author didn't need to know any details about how Twitter, the web, or tcp/ip works in order to build his search app. That's pretty cool.

    It was sad that he gave up on coding a website because there were too many braces in JavaScript. I guess that with practice the braces fall away and the underlying logic shines through. If he wants to get really shook up, he should check out LISP, the ultimate symbolic language. The parentheses will either break him or make him experience true programming bliss.

  11. Re:Fortran by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

    Yes, 1843, that sounds about the right year for this article to have been written

    You know it's 2018 and most people still don't have the first clue about programming. It's not exactly out of place.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  12. Re:Don't comment if you didn't read it by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Informative

    Don't comment if you didn't read it

    You must be new here. The point of slashdot it to read the headline then angrily shit on the people in TFA.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.