Programming for the Extremely Intimidated

Programming for the Extremely Intimidated (medium.com)

1 points by shriya 12 years ago | 5 comments

10098 12 years ago |

Good article! Especially this advice:

> If you are in high school or college, I would highly recommend using free/cheap online resources to get comfortable with programming languages and concepts, and then take some Computer Science courses to learn fundamentals and formalize your knowledge

However

> For all of the hardcore Web 1.0 programmers who say “Don’t Learn to Code”[...]

I'll leave aside the weird "Web 1.0" "hardcore" qualifiers (seriously, what's up with that?), but note that it links to Norvig's "Teach yourself programming in 10 years" piece. Why, may I ask? Is Norvig discouraging the reader from attempting to become a programmer? Of course not. All he's saying is that if you want to get good at it, you have to put in lots of effort for a long time. That's how you get good at anything. I mean, take the guitar for example. Nobody's going to question that it takes daily hours of practice, sweat and blood (literally, you'll bleed from your fingers) to become a guitarist. So why does programming have to be any different?

shriya 12 years ago | |

haha I didn't really know how to qualify them, I just was making the distinction that people who were programmers before the 2001 bubble, or basically "programmers before it was cool", have a different perspective than startup kids because their work has been on enterprise software. Very different than making a iOS game or personal resume site (which is what a lot of people want to do).

shriya 12 years ago | |

[updated it]

vezzy-fnord 12 years ago |

Only a little better than most of the fluff that has been posted on this topic. This one in particular seems to have a bias towards web development. Not that web development is wrong, but the article presents a very narrow path.

Then I found the notion of Java and C++ being "hardcore" to be quite odd. Is manifest typing considered hardcore these days? C++ is complex, but Java is the definitive dull enterprise language.

shriya 12 years ago | |

Don't you think the "fluff" is helpful to people who have no experience?

I purposely presented a narrow path so that readers are not overwhelmed by options. It's hard to know where to start with no guidance, so I directed beginners to the easiest entry point. When I tried taking a class in C++ it was intimidating to start with something so opaque.

I eliminated "hardcore" haha clearly the word didn't go over well.