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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.
Do you have any recommendations for getting into it later in life?
I messed around with Java, html and linux in high school, then got funneled into a pure bio track for about a decade for my career. At one point I went back to learning some R and python without having the fundamentals (I guess the academic version of a script kiddie) purely for doing genome sequencing/scRNA-seq work. Now I'm trying to learn some fundamentals; I've been working through the Harvard Edx CS50 class, with hopes of trying the machine learning class next.
Any thoughts? Keep in mind I'm probably limited to 1-2 hours per day with maybe a bit more flex on the weekend.
Programming is notorious for tutorial hell. One of the reasons for this is that not enough care is taken to differentiate the act of programming vs its applications. An analogue I can think of is that math is a tool, its used in Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, etc. Similarly programming is a tool its used in Physics, Engineering, Web development, etc. However, a lot of tutorials for some weird reason try to sneak in some Physics, Engineering, Web development (not literally) teaching along with the programming. This makes a beginner come away with the impression that the task of learning to program is much more onerous than it actually is. A lot of people would be put off by math as well if Calculus courses had some physics, engineering and biology in it.
So firstly, be clear in what you want to learn. Do you want to learn only programming? Or programming for some kind application? You would only do yourself favors if the programming and the programming relating to the application is well delineated, at least while you are learning and not informed enough to not get overwhelmed.
My suggestion to you based on;
First get familiar with the act of programming.
Choose one language and get good at it. Python is a no-brainer for beginners in general. And especially for the type of work you have to do. Just stick with python, no R for now, until you are not thinking in syntax anymore.
I suggest you watch this video and learn everything covered in this video. This video is far from comprehensive. It's far from perfect. But the point is to stick to something at all to begin with! This video will give you the ABC's of python. You can learn the how to write poems and novels later.
Once you are comfortable enough with the basic syntax of your first language that you don't have to check the correct syntax over and over again. Start doing some practice problems. There are hundreds of resources for this. LeetCode is an (in)famouse resource. However, be warned that even the "Easy" problems are difficult a beginner. These problems are meant to be tests of computer science application, so if you find them too hard, here are some easier ones. The objective here is to build for lack of better words "muscle memory".
Optional step. Once you are comfortable doing at least leetcode medium. You can read up a book on "Data structures and algorithms" or any such books on how to write better code. But I don't think these are necessary for non software engineers.
Familiarize yourself with the tools of your trade within your programming language of choice.
Do a project(s) of your own. This is good for soo many reasons. And is an order not a prescription.
Self motivating.
You will be tested on applying what you know
Most in line with real world work
Will force you to learn new things yourself via forum posts and documentation scouring, which is an essential skill in programming, despite not being related to it in any way.
Rewarding.
You do the above long enough, some of it concurrently and you will reach a point where you can just program. You don't think in syntax anymore, all languages will be the same. For example I can start writing in a new language within 30minutes - 1 hours of looking at it, because I already know what arrays, conditions and loops are; The syntax is superficial to a programmer, But to achieve that, you need to first master ONE language. Your ultimate goal is to understand the meaning not the teachers (compilers) password.
CS50x is good all things considered. For your needs I might suggest CS50p. But ideally you can pretty much learn programming without courses at all.
Thanks for the reply! Sorry, I was away all weekend. I'll take a crack at it.
Unfortunately, I think my final goals will be determined more by how much time I can carve out of the rest of my life for it rather than starting with some endpoint in mind. I'm fairly confident I never want to actually be writing the nitty-gritty code that analyzes bio data, but rather am looking for synergy with what I already know. I think at the far end if I ever end up running a bio startup incorporating machine learning it might be fun to mess around with in the beginning stages, or at the very least, be able to converse intelligently with the engineers involved. Bootstrapping a bio startup in my basement is much harder; you can do some bacterial and yeast work (probably illegally in a few different ways) for something in the range of thousands of dollars, but doing anything with mammalian cells would probably be in the 100k range just for capital costs and be more or less impossible to hide.
Anyways, that's where I'm at. I'll give those resources a try and maybe recalibrate my goals over the next few months.
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I'd add reading other people's code. I picked up a lot of coding by osmosis as a kid just fumbling around existing codebases, just trying to get a program to do something I wanted. I literally had no idea what is a for loop or what are function calls, I just dived in and tweaked it. Of course it works better the more background knowledge you have. But the main point is to se real code, instead of the idealized stuff that a lot of courses teach, eg "design patterns" just for the sake of design pattern, unrealistic standards of code cleanness, like the very opinionated Clean Code etc. The best open source products from respected companies don't code like that, but get shit done. I'm not advocating for spaghetti code, just to get a taste for real, working codebases as opposed to toy examples with unrealistic elegance. By reading code you can pick up good or bad habits alike, but that's not a reason to avoid it.
I would put this into the "things that you probably should do" bin. Issue being there are a thousand things like this to be done. Read forums. immerse yourself in the culture, read open source code, read new papers coming out, read documentation for fun, etc.
It leads back to your initial point, motivation. Those who are motivated will naturally do all of those things out of curiosity. But I am not sold on the idea that making someone uninterested do those things will make them good. Nonetheless, reading other peoples code does have high returns relative to "things you should probably do aswell".
Also we don't demand this from Engineers or any other profession (maybe barring doctors). Electrical engineers are not prescribed looking at other engineers schematics in their free time (even if it made them better Engineers). Programming is in this weird zone where its not standardized enough that only the most passionate of autists are the ones who make it through all the hoops.
Someone who is uninterested will never become good anyway, so you might as well encourage them to do these things and find out if they are or not. I have worked 25 years in this industry and never met a developer I respected who was not in love with it.
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Well, maybe those professions are being held back then. But electrical engineers are close enough to programmers in culture, I'd say. Or at least they are in my bubble. And as for other engineers, there's less of an open culture and things are proprietary. Realistic projects can only be done on the company scale in industry, there no equivalent of free software or Github for those professions.
Also,I don't think that other professions are really as straightforward and standardized as these conversations make it seem. Programming isn't sooo unique. Generic IT admin stuff or network engineering, infrastructure design etc also has a lot of the same difficulties. And someone who mucks around their home router and built some PCs as a kid will be better at such IT work. You'll be a better car mechanic if you're in some car modding community since growing up. You'll be better at roofing, construction planning, flooring, plumbing design etc if you dive into it obsessively. People just don't do it that much for whatever reason.
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