This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 consider myself a competent (not great, certainly not "rock star") programmer. I was formally taught. I definitely have strong areas and weak areas. I am good at coding and recognizing when someone else has written crappy code, and figuring out higher-level solutions. I am not great at grinding out leetcode problems (I can do it, but not brilliantly or easily), and algorithm classes were my bane.
(I am trying to teach myself about quantum computing right now, just out of personal interest, and man, I am not enjoying having to brush up on my linear algebra.)
Coding to me is more art than science, but I learned the science and understand the need for that foundational background. Thus, I agree with most of your observations. Most people can learn to build some things by following tutorials and memorizing patterns, and that's probably good enough for putting together apps like legos, but real programming requires knowing something about the bits and the hardware, at some level, and knowing a lot about data structures and algorithms.
I think that, as you say, persistence is the key to being a good programmer. Anecdotally, I have also observed few really good women programmers, but I suspect this is more because the kind of persistence/obsessiveness involved in figuring out solutions to hard problems with no more reward than that sudden "Aha, I finally got this fucking thing to work!" is rare in women. Whether that rarity is the product of biological or social conditioning is kind of irrelevant, frankly - women just don't usually have it.
That said, I also see in newer hires a lack of that sort of persistence both among the men and the women. Probably somewhat "Old man griping about the young'uns" here, but I've seen an increasing tendency of kids with fresh CS degrees to not really know how to independently track down the solution to a problem, including scouring stackoverflow and APIs et al. They sort of throw their hands up and ask very broad questions in channels like "Hey, this thing isn't working, can anyone tell me why?" Or "How do I do ?" ("Thing" being a fairly complicated multi-step process that requires experience mostly consisting of trying to do it and figuring out how to get past each obstacle one by one.) And they do this at every step. I have to gently point them at where to go to look for the solution to the next step, when I want to say "This is called being a programmer - read the documentation, use Google, and figure it out!"
My general impression is that the quality of CS grads has definitely gone down. Admittedly, I am not seeing a lot of grads from the top schools, so maybe things are better there and all those kids go to FAANG companies.
I am amazed at how many programmers never read the documentation. I've had many coworkers, not just younger, give up if they don't already know the solution to the problem. It should be bog standard to peruse the API calls, and fiddle in test programs with anything you don't understand. But most don't.
They don't want to discover a solution, they want someone to figure it out for them, and tell them exactly what to do.
A level up from that would be reading the source code of the libraries yourself (assuming it's available). A level up from that would be studying the byte code as an absolutely last resort.
Because sometimes you do find bugs in libraries. Or annoying deficiencies. Once I was using an open source websocket library, but had to use a bearer token for authentication. The websocket library came years before the requirement for bearer tokens, and it did not support it at all. The guy who maintained it had weird ideological reasons to never include it. But fuck it, it's open source. So away I went hacking it in. No big deal. But it's remarkable how few programmers are truly willing to go wading through someone else's code.
Honestly, given the quality of the documentation provided by most libraries etc these days, it's often easier to jump straight into the source. At best, the behaviour is undocumented. More likely the documentation is from six months ago when it worked entirely differently. The devs probably notified everyone about the change in behaviour via Discord or something.
EDIT: I think being given solutions to problems tends to be more valuable when you've tried your best to solve the problem yourself already. Then the answer is like a flash of light. If you just read about a problem and a solution, it's just a series of facts to store away for later.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link