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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.
A couple things stand out to me from your post. I consider myself a very good programmer, and after managing around 100 other ones I've gotten some experience as to what makes good ones. Note that my market is east coast enterprise software for whatever that's worth.
First, I find it surprising you've never met a great female coder. I think you need to work with more people. They're rare, absolutely, but if you're not in a place that hires women because they're women then the bell curve of their quality is the same as men from my experience.
I was trained in the "intuition" method. While I've met phenoms that were self-taught or bootcampers my guess is around 2% of them are good enough for me to want to hire, vs around 10% that have gotten a degree (and those degree programs were, when they got them, using an early focus on data structures etc.).
That being said, I did find so much theory for so long to be incredibly frustrating. It's not a stretch to say that I learned more about coding in the monthlong training put on by my first company than I did in a whole year of school. I think the theory matters, but the current CS and SWE accreditation requirements need some major adjustments, IMO. I would have killed for a databases class and requiring the use of source control.
I agree with you that trying to dumb down coding instruction seems like a win but isn't. You may keep freshmen around long enough to sink into the program where they can't get out without burning money, but they'll be shittier programmers. Your brother's professor using Processing seems almost unbelievably stupid for so many reasons. Java and C# are already high level enough for a newbie to take a crack at them, much less something like Python. Why on earth would you waste a semester not developing exposure to a valuable language?
I am actually, however, grateful that my C/C++ class was second year. The place I was taught had a brutal class that was supposedly just 1 hour but was easily the hardest single programming class I took. Because of it I was able to wipe the floor with other students at a different school when I transferred, but I honestly don't know if I would have fallen in love with programming if my only runtime error messages were just
segmentation fault.gdb --args !!You can even set the SIGSEGV handler to automatically attach gdb to the running program.
GDB is
not easy to learn
even less easy to learn if you are a part of the modern GUI/webapp/the-fuck-is-a-shell generation (so, the problem statement at hand)
doesn't even scale to larger projects, so you can hardly say you'll use it in a real job
Compare it with, let's say, the chrome debug console. Or the vscode debugger for python. They're far more intuitive than
x/10ginfo all-regs,b 0x1234,ni×100, etc.Sure, but just
btandqalready gets you 50% of the benefit.More options
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You can just run a nodejs program with
--inspectand the chrome debugger will automatically find it and connect (green icon, top left corner), and then you can debug it just like you would a website! It's much nicer than gdb.More options
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