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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.
This is a subject near and dear to me. Because I positively loath working with most new programmers. I loath this entire generation of "programmers" that never had to manage memory. That just stitches libraries together to accomplish 99% of their tasks. And if it isn't garbage collected, and it isn't a library, they flail around uselessly.
That's "programming" in the same way purchasing a bird house kit from a hobby shop is "wood working". Yes, you are technically using a tool that is also used in that activity. But 95% of the work was done for you. And they are barely even cognizant of that fact.
But I'm a fucking crazy person. I got annoyed that 86Box didn't work with my HOTAS once, so I downloaded the source and fixed it myself. A certain especially difficult level of Populous pissed me off to such a degree, I download the version of DOSBOX with the debugger built in and began dissecting the bytecode that effects the AI speed. Successfully I might add. Patched a version of the game just for me that was a smidge easier for my aged reaction times. When the Oculus Quest came out, I was annoyed that a lot of Gear VR games would run on it, but the controls weren't mapped to the right buttons. Since most of those games just run Unity, and use the built in Oculus plugins, I discovered I could replace the .net bytecode in the dlls to remap the controls. So I took about a half dozen Gear VR games I liked, unpacked the APK files, edited the DLLs, repacked and signed the APK files, and then loaded them onto my Oculus Quest.
Lately I decided I wanted to learn x86 assembly, targeting the 8088 platform, BIOS/DOS function calls, EGA graphics and Adlib music. Wrote a sprite editor, currently working on an adlib tracker. All in assembly. It's so much fun, I love it.
So yeah, I'm a fucking lunatic.
I came up through a Computer Engineering program. There was programming in all 4 years of it, largely in C++, but also Java and Python (which I hated). But other required courses were the material properties of transistors, which I largely forgot. Then how to create adders and other simple electronics out of discrete components (NAND gates, XOR gates, etc). Then some assembly on this project board I actually still have, but can't recall at all what it ran.
I still remember, after I graduated, I was talking with a buddy of mine who did a Computer Science degree at a different school. At some point he asked me "So how did we get to where we are now, with operating systems and compilers and stuff?" I was blown away that after 4 years, and a Computer Science degree, he didn't know that.
Increasingly, the teaching of programming is "vibes based" as you put it. Fundamentally incompetent people are being handed degrees. The only reason they appear to be able to perform a task that vaguely resembles programming is that people smarter than they or their entire lineage will ever be set the table for them.
Okay but garbage collection is better than reference counting for performance though, and reference counting is better than manual for sanity, certainly so when you're writing trees.
I'm not dismissing garbage collection whole sale. I'm dismissing programmers who have known nothing else.
Here is an example. Once upon a time i had to shove about 10 thousand objects into NASA Worldwind and see how it ran. It ran like dog shit. Because whatever fresh graduate they had coding it reallocated memory for each objects screen transformation every frame. So it triggered the gc literally multiple times a frame with a few thousand objects to render. That is a level of idiocy only possible if you learned to program in an environment where you were barely cognizant memory was a resource with costs associated with it.
Eh, this basically feels like a box out of the famous XKCD comic.
If you don't understand the difference between dick measuring over your choice of text editor, and fundamentally not understanding how a computer works, then yes, it's superficially similar.
My disgust reaction to argumentum ad XKCD aside, it does make me wonder. Did programmers of old complain when things moved from byte code on punch cards to disks and actual languages, with compilers and all? I certainly had a few professors who seemed to have such a chip on their shoulder.
It wasn't byte code on punch cards to disks and actual languages. Compilers were rather early in the game, and macro-assemblers too. FORTRAN goes back to 1957, COBOL 1959, the well-known FORTRAN IV in 1962. FORTRAN was famously designed for punched cards, which is why the strict column rules in FORTRAN 77 and earlier. Aside from grouching about "you're not a real programmer until you've had to sort the box of punched cards you dropped on the ground", I don't think there was serious complaining about the move away from them. Complaints about assembler v. high level languages survived for much longer.
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