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What is your ideal programming education ?
Recently trying to teach my younger brother (CS freshman in Canadian university) programming and having that devolving into a yelling session (kicked the dog there) left me wondering about the state of programming education.
How is this CW?
Because in any discussion of any type of education system there is an undercurrent disagreement between the blank slatists and the "IQ believers (or whatever this group is called)".
How to teach something can also be split along CW lines. See common core, phonics vs whole language, etc.
On top of that there is the group representation angle. Certain groups of people are disproportionately represented in programming professions.
My thoughts/priors on the points above
I think IQ is very obviously correlated with programming ability, I think this is the default prior of anyone who believes in the predictive usefulness of IQ. However, I would go a step ahead and say that a very specific type of intelligence that probably correlates with IQ score, but is distinct is along certain dimensions could be a better predictor of programming ability. See Dehnadis work.
My personal observation is that all good programmers I know show signs of high intelligence but not everyone who shows signs of high intelligence shows programming aptitude proportional to their intelligence. I am not entirely sure if its a "wordcel vs shape rotator" issue, the dichotomy isn't as obvious as is with Electrical Engineering for example.
I have come across two fairly distinct methods of teaching programming. I would classify them as 'trying to impart intuition' vs. 'trying to impart knowledge.'
The former consists of teaching via gamified methods where students are made to play elaborate games consisting of programming puzzles, modify existing code to draw out 2-d shapes and animations, etc. Once students develop some familiarity with changing words in a file to make the computer do something, they are introduced to data types, data structures, control flow, etc.
The latter is a more 'rigorous' approach where students are taught the fundamentals such as data types, structures, flow, interpreter vs compiler, etc first; Then they are made to write programs. These programs are sometimes gamified but not to the extent as the former.
I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method. More on this later.
Obvious racial stratification. But I think putting that aside, the gender stratification is worth more discussion. Even the best discussions I could find on the topic simply boils down to "differences interest". I think that isn't the complete picture.
I really don't want to do women dirty like this but, I have yet to come across a "good" female programmer. I really don't know what it is at the root of this. My superficial intuition is that a certain aspect of becoming a good programmer is just relentlessness. Sometimes you need to try out 100 different bug fixes and read through 50 stack overflow and obscure forum posts to fix a certain problem or get something working. Men in my experience are much much more willing to swim through the stack overflow and debugger sewers than women.
But that isn't the entire picture, I just don't see women writing naturally good code, if that even is a term. And by that I mean the code a person rights with the knowledge of the fundamentals but no knowledge of coding best practices such as separation of concerns, lose coupling, etc. Men in my experience naturally tended to write "better" code without prior knowledge. A lot of the female students I taught used to roll their eyes when being explained good practices.
Intuition vs Knowledge
Programming is hard. Teaching it is also hard. Beginner tutorials tend to have an order of more magnitude views than advanced tutorials.
I am sure that the intuition based teaching methods were born out of frustration with the fact that students couldn't connect the pieces together despite being aware of all the pieces and how they work. But having seen it first hand, I just don't understand how it can teach someone programming at all.
My brother knows how to draw a submarine and make it sway up and down but doesn't know that
voidmeans nothing. He is being made to write out words without knowing what they mean and of course its all served in a bowl of global variable spaghetti. The professor chose dumbed down Java 2-d animation package called Processing to teach the class. The documentation is horrendous, its a shadow of what Java is. Why not just use Java? Or even python??This is very much madness from my pov. Changing lines in code the way the students in my brothers class are being made to do is so far removed from the act of programming or even the primitives of programming that I am left wondering if the "vibes" people have gotten their noses in there as well.
I was taught much differently with an introduction to compilers, data types, conditionals, etc. All of it in C, and despite using python for 99% of my word, I am eternally grateful for having started with C.
It is so much of an over-correction from what I assume is the traditional way of teaching programming that I just can't wrap my mind around it, It might pass for school children but University? I mean I get it even MIT is teaching intro to CS in Python, but at least they are still teaching the actual language and not some bastardchild of it.
I think the fact of the matter might be that demand for CS degrees far exceeds requirement for CS practitioners. The universities are not being honest to their students and are making it all seem like a game in a with the hope that it will all work out for some reason.
Edit - To further clarify why I think the intuition based method is ineffective.
Intuition is hard to impart.
Here's the submarine example from my brothers class with some more detail. The question asks for "Make the submarine sway up and down in a wave and go from left to right".
To even a notice programmer it is immediately obvious that this means the x-coordinates need to be incremented every frame and the y coordinates are just sin(x). That intuition is abstracted behind a 2-d animation task. This is adding in excessive intellectual baggage, its not necessary to anyone who understands a loop.
Valuable time is being wasted on making 2-d shapes do things as opposed to knowing the tools that make them do things. I could solve the submarine problem instantly because I know what a loop is.
I realized as an adult that I do not retain knowledge if I am given that knowledge before I have any way to apply it. I suspect I'm not alone in this; but regardless, I strongly prefer the teaching methodology where you are made acquainted with tools by being given problems which necessitate using those tools. By "tools", here, I refer to algorithms and data structures, among other things. (I think this is why, even though I loved my Algorithms and Data Structures courses, I hated Operating Systems and whatever one it was that taught us assembly language. I retained very little of those and do not count them among the good or useful courses I took.)
I'm aware that this "knowledge-first-to-use-it-later" approach is similar to how the hard sciences are taught; I hated it there as well.
My actual start in programming came from hacking around in the Civilization 4 Python codebase, where I built mods for Fall From Heaven 2 and by necessity had to learn programming syntax-- I was only formally educated in programming later. Contrary to what your argument above would predict I was by far the strongest coder in my graduating class, and went on to get a job in FAANG (where I was, in my judgement, roughly at the top 20% of programmer strength in the company.)
So I don't know the total of what my "ideal programmer education" consists of, but I'm pretty sure a big chunk of it would involve writing a self-designed mod for the game Slay The Spire.
Okay okay, hear me out, this has a number of advantages:
Slay the Spire is entirely programming-first. There is no "editor" interface, as a Unity game would have.
Slay the Spire modding has, as its first step, decompiling the codebase. This gets your student exposure to "the act of having to understand somebody else's extremely nontrivial code".
The codebase is also written using fairly reasonable best practices, particularly for a gaming studio-- it uses polymorphism to deal with all the myriad cards and their effects, which allows you to see very intuitively how polymorphism is used in the wild and why it's valuable. (I know that in my own programming education all of our programs were trivial enough that interfaces and abstract classes seemed weird and pointless, and none of my instructors could give what felt like adequate explanations for their use.)
You can get something pretty cool out the other side-- a game mod! Having something cool and nontrivial that you're in the process of building is worth any number of credit points in inspiring motivation to actually learn programming.
It's Java, which is a very standard programming language which features automated memory management.
So I think if I were designing a programming practicum it would feature game-modding as a big part of it, with perhaps some Code Combat or similar coding game in the first couple of weeks to familiarize students with the basic syntax and philosophy around programming in some reasonably entertaining format. And, of course, some problem sets later that showcase situations where students are given no choice but to use the standard data structures and algorithms.
What were you doing with FFH? I might have some of your work installed.
I'm a very poor programmer, the only thing I did was edit some Leader files to stack good traits on an Amurite leader in Ashes of Erebus so I could try to make an archmage Master of all the elements and achieve omnipotence.
I did the More Leaders Modmod!
The coding was extremely low-quality and the Python was probably buggy as hell. But it was mine.
EDIT: Wait, I think Ashes of Erebus did end up incorporating some of my work! How's that project going, by the by?
I think Ashes is basically finished. They added a race of Hamstalfar, hamsters lording over elves. That broke my immersion somewhat.
Was your More Leaders anything to do with the Minor/Emerging leaders in Ashes of Erebus?
I added a bunch of minor leaders, but I didn't do any of the mechanics behind Minor Leaders in general.
I... did not much like the Hamstalfar.
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I also have the experience that I am incapable of remembering things that are not applicable.
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