Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats.html

by joeyespo • 14 years ago

201 129 14 years ago

codinghorror.com

raganwald• 14 years ago

Jeff closes with the following words IN BOLD:

“The act of programming seems literally unteachable to a sizable subset of incoming computer science students”

There is, of course, an alternate explanation:

“We in Universities seem literally incapable of teaching programming to a sizable subset of incoming computer science students”

Experiments going back to the 1980s with teaching children how to program using Lego blocks and robots with Logo seem to indicate that nearly everyone can learn how to program, but possibly not when they’re 18 or 19 and possibly not with the kind of academic environment represented by the test.

mgrouchy• 14 years ago

I think you have got it right. I would love to think that I am fairly special in my ability to write software, but I hesitate to believe that people cannot learn something.

Its more likely that people are being taught the wrong way, rather then the idea that lacking a natural aptitude for programming you don't have a chance.

guyzero• 14 years ago

I would counter-counter that there practically no teacher that can teach. Elementary & high school math teachers deliver a lot of practice, but that ultimately they really just aim to "teach" the kids who naturally understand math. The rest just stumble along and the system covers it up. The same is true for English, History, Phys Ed and pretty much everything.

lbotos• 14 years ago

I don't think the same is true for everything, but I do think this is the case in a fair bit of Math classrooms. I've tutored both a friend (same age) and his his younger sister (5 years younger) and they both struggled with the same exact concepts. Granted, you could say it was genetics, but after some creative examples, they were able to better their skills. It looked to me as a direct failure to truly "teach" Math in the 6-7th grade level of their elementary school district.

joeyespo• 14 years ago

This article seems to touch on the explanation a bit more.

http://www.bricklin.com/wontprogram.htm

It's not that Johnny can't program, it's just that he won't.

rickmb• 14 years ago

Methinks age is the most important factor here.

We teach children the basics skills needed for most studies well before that age. Reading, writing, math etc. You can't expect someone to successfully study literature if they don't know how to read.

Programming is a skill, not just a matter of knowledge, and the foundations for that skill must be laid at an earlier age. Most skills we learn after that are just extensions of those basic skills.

I'm not sure about the current generation, but in my age group (40+), everyone who programs started in their early teens.

ceol2• 14 years ago

I don't think age is as big a factor as you make it. I learned how to program at about 19 and got right into without any previous programming experience. If programming is indeed a skill, then why can't someone learn it at any age? My father, in his early 50s, is learning the skill of "debugging" his iPad when he needs to do something; instead of calling me, he's starting to use forums and search engines to find his answer. I would consider that a skill, yet he's learning it without having any computer experience at all.

What basic skills are the foundations for programming? Abstract thought? Deductive reasoning? Maybe someone is more inclined towards programming versus some other field, but I believe everyone has— at any age— the ability to learn how to program, much like everyone has the ability to learn a new spoken language at any age.

paganel• 14 years ago

> Experiments going back to the 1980s with teaching children how to program using Lego blocks and robots with Logo seem to indicate that nearly everyone can learn how to program, but possibly not when they’re 18 or 19 and possibly not with the kind of academic environment represented by the test.

I only learned how to program at around age 20 or 21, but at that point I had already been a CS student for 2 years, and of course had failed most of the actual programming-related classes (even though I had earned a A+ in calculus, with congratulations from the professor). I am now a professional programmer, I'm in my early 30s, and as such I'll quickly write down my thoughts on this, maybe it helps someone make some sense of it.

Now, about the particular example in the article, I can still remember the first programming class during my first semester at Uni. I can still remember about how baffled I was when seeing almost the exact same code as in the above article, I was wondering to myself: "assignment works left to right, is the only natural way, what do you mean now "a has the value of b"? You first write down a, the 'equal' sign, and then b, it's only normal that b, coming at the end, takes the value of a". And so on. Someone also mentioned the "competitive" nature of a CS-class, which is 100% spot-on. I had never owned a computer during high-school, while some of the my then-colleagues had been programming for 10 years already, and because of that I was afraid to ask questions or even to ask for help from my colleagues.

And in case you're wondering how did I finally became a programmer, well, it was thanks to Python. At first I started writing some ugly scripts in PHP, but after 6 months I stumbled upon Python. I don't know exactly why, but it's something about this language that makes it very easy for non-programmers to grasp programming language concepts. After one year of doing Python I finally had the balls to try and take my most difficult programming class again. I got an A (the class was taught using the C programming language), with the professor surprised about how had I managed to do that.

Jach2• 14 years ago

I think Python's a great language to start with, maybe. What turned me on to PHP and web programming is that I could do things easily and get visual results back. Flask is a better way to build server side apps than raw PHP, but it hides a lot and a significant part of the Python language needs to be understood to understand a lot of it.

I spent a year learning about website design shortly after turning 14 and during that time eventually came across PHP. For about another year until 10th grade started, I kept doing simple PHP sites. I had looked at Python once and felt kind of offended by it, and I didn't understand OOP. "Why do I have to do mystr.split(' ') instead of explode(' ', $mystr)?" "Why don't variables have sigils?" "What's this import crap?" "Why do I have to have indentation?" (I commonly didn't indent my PHP code during this time.) I also used Windows. I still hate cmd.exe.

I took the AP CS course in 10th grade, and Java forced me to at least partially understand OOP and why it may be useful or cool. (We also did everything on a Mandrake Linux computer.) I looked at Python again about midway through the year and started loving it (I was in the habit of indenting with one space at that point since the teacher required at least some indentation so Python's forced indentation didn't bug me anymore). After several months in Python I began to understand that real OOP went far beyond what Java supported. Now that I'm 21 Python is still my favorite language, but I do really like Clojure.

So I still think Python is a perfect beginner's language, but I'm not entirely convinced that Python as Python is enough to spark an interest to go do your own thing. The first thing I reached for when I learned Python well enough to do anything was video game programming. Making interactive applications that aren't limited to the terminal held my interest a lot more back then.

(My CS teacher also resolved many difficulties with the = sign by always reading code like "a = b" as "a gets b". Some people have trouble enough with homonyms in language, seeing the '=' mean something completely different to what they've been used to for 10 years can be startling.)

roguecoder2• 14 years ago

I saw a pre-intro programming class that took people who would otherwise have been in the sheep category and led them to succeed at the rate as those already coming in with successful backgrounds.

If we know that the problem is a lack of a consistent mental model, the solution is to learn how to teach adults to have a consistent mental model, not to throw up our hands as these researchers seem to do. To me this study suggests we aren't teaching the important skills necessary to program. We may need the equivalent of Drawing With The Right Side of the Brain for code.

After all, a 22% failure rate is still pretty pathetic.

sunils34• 14 years ago

It's really all about how you teach programming. My first exposure to programming was in high school where a math teacher who had never coded a day in her life was thrown into the position for some extra cash. I witnessed the dichotomy first hand here--and I was clearly in the wrong bell-curve. But that summer, I attended a summer program where it was taught properly. First explaining the context and history of programming, and then exposing us to real world applications. This had a huge rate of success for everyone in that program.

I don't think that the goats will ever go away, but I do think that if taught properly, that the ratio of people who understand to those who don't can be on the order of someone who understands an art history class to someone who doesn't-- or any other area of specialization for that matter.

jpastika• 14 years ago

Similarly, my first exposure to programming was in a high school AP (advanced placement/college credit) class taught by a math teacher. The teacher would give us an assignment and then leave the room for the rest of the period. As a group we would come up with an answer in about 5 minutes and then spend the rest of the time playing games on the class computers. His teaching method wasn't exactly effective for me, and needless to say I didn't learn a whole lot. I ended up getting a 1 (on a scale of 1-5, 1 being terrible) on the exam. The way I ended up learning and becoming infatuated with programming was with my TI-82 calculator. By trial and error I would write programs for games, class notes (hi-tech cheat sheets) and animations. In college I began taking "real" programming classes, but found the teaching to be both dated and lacking real-world application. I kept learning through side projects though and now, 12 years later, I realize that in this vocation, there is never an end to learning and that people can learn in so many different ways.

I think the misconception some teachers have is that if a student is struggling, he or she is either incapable of learning the material or just not trying. The reality is that it could just be a reflection of how effective the teacher's methods are for that particular student.

kghose• 14 years ago

May I know where these folks teach, so I may never send my children there. I expect teachers to teach new concepts. I expect them to gradually train an untrained mind.

This test merely indicates that teachers, by tossing out untrained minds and using a subset of already trained minds, can skip the challenging part of their job and take credit where none is really due.

Grrr.

Shebanator• 14 years ago

Weird to see a blog post from 2006 show up here. Especially when I read it and discovered I'd already commented on it...

lutorm2• 14 years ago

That article is positively drenched in fixed mindset (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...). Those prophecies tend to be self-fulfilling. But as raganwald says, the only evidence is that universities fail to teach a sizable fraction of the population. Maybe the trick is not to play with IDEs or whatever else they claimed to have tried, but to get rid of the computer and focus on what programs are: instructions for how to do something.

The example of "mental model of assignment" is ridiculous. a=b can mean whatever. It means something totally different to a mathematician than a programmer. Say:

"The piece of paper on the left says dog and the piece of paper on the right says cat. Overwrite the contents of the piece of paper on the left with the contents of the piece of paper on the right. What is written on the pieces of paper?"

I bet pretty much everyone would have a correct mental model of assignment if the problem was stated like that.

patio11• 14 years ago

I bet pretty much everyone would have a correct mental model of assignment if the problem was stated like that.

Try this experiment with five people at a public place, say exactly what you said, and give them exactly one try at the correct answer. I'll give $10 to charity for each one that getes it right. If all five of them get it wrong, you owe me an upvote.

(Fair warning, the terms of this bet are ridiculously unfair to you.)

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

My bet is on lutorm, the point is that the original questions are ambiguous and if you remove some of the ambiguity you increase the chances of someone getting it right.

My theory is that those who got it right (at least most of them) didn't get it because they "formed a consistent model". But simply because they made the same assumptions people before them did when creating the language. But of course, would need more data to be more sure of anything.

mentat• 14 years ago

I explained this to some as, "values from from right to left across the equals sign. In this case 10 flows into a, 20 flows into b, then the value of b, 20, flows into a, making a 20 and b 20." I think it's a matter of saying what '=' means in words that people can understand since it doesn't mean '=' in the mathematically sense (which is '==' or '===' depending on language).

JonahBraun• 14 years ago

> The example of "mental model of assignment" is ridiculous. a=b can mean whatever. It means something totally different to a mathematician than a programmer. Say:

That's why the first group (the predicted to be successful group) is defined as forming a consistent mental model and not necessarily the correct one:

> 44% of students formed a consistent mental model of how assignment works (even if incorrect!)

jules• 14 years ago

How about students who reason like this:

I don't know what the notation means and there is no way for me to know what it means. Therefore I'm going to use a different interpretation in each question to minimize the variance in my grade.

eridius• 14 years ago

You may want to re-read the article. It never said that having a correct mental model of assignment meant anything at all. It said having a _consistent_ mental model of assignment was what was important. Correctness can be taught, but people who cannot maintain a consistent model will always fail, because even if they're taught the correct way, they won't apply it consistently.

lutorm2• 14 years ago

Ok, sorry for misspeaking, but I don't think it changes the conclusion. I don't know how to measure consistency in my example, but correctness necessarily implies consistency.

gioele2• 14 years ago

> The example of "mental model of assignment" is ridiculous. a=b can mean whatever. It means something totally different to a mathematician than a programmer.

> "The piece of paper on the left says dog and the piece of paper on the right says cat.

We are talking about university students. I think they all have had a bit of calculus. That they had to "find the x" or "give the value of y = 1/(3/x) to the third decimal when 1) x = 3, 2) x = 5".

If your 18-year old students need to be told of "dog" and "cat" on pieces of paper in order to understand the most basic abstraction that math has, well, you, as a teacher, will find big difficulties ahead.

roguecoder2• 14 years ago

but algebra is specifically non-directional. If I saw "a=10 b=20 a=b" as a non-programming, I'd assume the answer was "not possible".

Geee• 14 years ago

This is exactly the problem here. If you show a=1+1; b=3; a=b; to someone with math background, their brain will most likely explode, because they'll think that every equality has to hold at the same time.

Also I think it's impossible to hold a consistent mental model (whatever it is) if people can't form a logic behind the operation.

jseims• 14 years ago

I used to teach the first CS course at both Harvard and University of Washington. I didn't have this issue at Harvard, but at UW there was definitely a bimodal distribution in abilities. Roughly half the students had what I feel is a more visual / associative way of thinking vs. the focused structure you need to program.

The concept that the "non programmers" could never understand was the abstraction of functions. Like:

foo(a) { // stuff }

foo(b);

would confuse them because they'd get hung up on foo's parameter declared as 'a', but called with 'b'.

Raesan• 14 years ago

I took a few CS classes at the University of Washington in the 08–09 academic year. The intro CS classes had recently been redesigned [1] to be more effective. Anecdotally: I talked four of my friends into taking one or both of the intro classes (split evenly between science/non-science majors), and they all did well and really enjoyed them. I think how programming is taught at colleges is definitely a fixable problem.

[1] http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/reges/sigcse/

dpritchett3• 14 years ago

Why not use explicit function parameters then?

    def count_orange_slices(number_of_oranges):
        return number_of_oranges * 8

    size_of_my_orange_stash = 10

    count_orange_slices(number_of_oranges=size_of_my_orange_stash)
    >> 80

lnanek• 14 years ago

From the article: >To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion.

I guess it is reasonable that people have a hard time with this. They've grown up their whole lives dealing with people and animals and themselves. These act according to wants and gloss over minor errors, a fuzzy world full of fuzzy actors. Heck, even our species has lived and evolved mostly dealing with such. It doesn't make much sense to them that one typo could cause a super powerful computer or expensive device to keel over and be useless and do nothing.

cletus• 14 years ago

I see this largely as a failure of education. You see this issue in many areas and much earlier on like teaching mathematics. In schools there tends to be one method used and that method doesn't suit everybody.

I see this at work. I've known programmers who, when they get a new hire, will basically let them flounder. I guess the basic idea is that if you're "good" you'll "figure it out" (with minimal time investment to boot). And that will work with some people. My own philosophy is that there are a significant number of people who need direction. Don't overwhelm them with "everything". Give them small, structured tasks to learn processes, small parts of the system, build confidence and give some measure of progress.

That all being said, I honestly don't know how I learnt to program at all. I can teach people who know how to program (the basics) more. But I can't teach someone who doesn't know how to program how to program.

I've come around to thinking that Zed Shaw (as just one example) is right about this. With his "Learn X the Hard Way" books he starts out by basically saying "just type this in" (and don't copy and paste). Don't worry what it does. You'll figure that out later.

I see people (in many different areas) who are under the mistaken impression they need to know "everything" before they can do anything (or even in games, make a decision of any kind). They feel the need to weigh up all the options and consider all the consequences. That's not actually how people learn (IMHO).

Children don't know any better so can just learn this way. Adults often let self-doubt, fear of embarrassment or fear of "what might happen" get in the way such that they won't allow themselves to learn.

So perhaps what universities should do is separate students who already know how to program from those that don't. Those that don't don't take ANY theory at all until they do an introductory course that starts with "just type this in". If you lack the ability (and willingness) to turn a thought into a program, no matter how simple, you're doomed to failure. This, I believe, is something that can be taught.

The ability to just try stuff and see what happens in a key element in continual learning (IMHO) and something that needs to be ingrained in programmers (to be) from day one.

I'd really love to see the outcome of this approach versus more traditional approaches.

zedshaw• 14 years ago

> I see this largely as a failure of education. You see this issue in many areas and much earlier on like teaching mathematics. In schools there tends to be one method used and that method doesn't suit everybody.

I've found that education, at least K-12, is slowly shifting attitudes from 'Why are students so dumb?' to 'How can we teach this better?' Computer Science is notoriously bad at believing the former over the latter, and papers like this are demonstrations of this.

dpritchett3• 14 years ago

It would be a lot easier to teach CS to 18 year olds if they had stronger foundations in algebra, logic, and abstractions.

When "teach a bunch of freshmen to program" is your mission statement then it's perfectly understandable to prefer the students with solid fundamentals.

allenp2• 14 years ago

You make a number of good points but I want to respond to one thing - the failure of education.

I think it may not be so much a failure of education as so much the economics of education. The use of a single curriculum reduces complexity and administrative overhead (teacher time) which at the professor level is expensive. If the computer science courses were designed to use multiple methods you could indeed better educate a variety of students but at an increased cost.

In my mind the question then is whether or not it is worth the money to educate those that can't succeed with the current teaching method. The entire CS department would need to charge students more per class in order to have more successful students and in order to justify this cost there would need to be a corresponding beneficial pressure for the student to pay those costs (increased demand or higher pay for programmers).

Zikes• 14 years ago

Wouldn't increasing the success rate by 30-60% pay for itself? If that much of the class fails out after the first course, that's tuition lost for the remainder of the courses, is it not?

parfe2• 14 years ago

>I see this largely as a failure of education. You see this issue in many areas and much earlier on like teaching mathematics. In schools there tends to be one method used and that method doesn't suit everybody.

Good thing professional educators are almost as observant as you in regard to teaching.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=differentiated+instruction

I really love how HN conceit lets people post about entire industries as if those people just have no clue what they are doing. And not only do people here hold those pompous and generally ignorant positions, but other people support them!

dpritchett3• 14 years ago

I read cletus's post to suggest that primary math education (i.e. young children) isn't personalized very much. This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S. A lot of it is budgets and politics. No need to infer that cletus believes he is a more thoughtful educator than people who spend their careers on it.

SkyMarshal2• 14 years ago

Nice idea, but to what extent has it been implemented? Hard to find info on that. And in my own experience, differentiated instruction within the context of traditional mixed-ability, set-pace classroom instruction is still relatively weak.

Further, why be an ass and post a lmgtfy link when the op is clearly not aware of the term to google. You see the contradiction there I'm sure. Next time just post a link to the search results.

shasta• 14 years ago

Here's the argument that shows that the educators are doing something wrong. I'll break it down into numbered points:

1. If you spend three weeks on only the topic of assignment, any idiot (who has been admitted to university) can master that one concept to the level required to answer this stupid simple question correctly.

2. The fact that the students failed to exhibit mastery of even this one simple point at end the of three weeks means the class moved past this very fundamental concept too quickly.

3. It follows that this study doesn't really address the question of how students would do at programming if this fundamental mental model were taught.

Point 1 is the weakest, as it is justified only by common sense, but I'd put money on it.

SkyMarshal2• 14 years ago

Good points. To add a few from my own experience:

>I've come around to thinking that Zed Shaw (as just one example) is right about this. With his "Learn X the Hard Way" books he starts out by basically saying "just type this in" (and don't copy and paste). Don't worry what it does. You'll figure that out later.

That's basically the 10,000hr approach - the earlier you start programming, even at Zed's most basic level, the earler you start rewiring your neurons to do it more efficiently and effectively. For the natural born programmers in the article's study, this isn't necessary, but for that whole other group aren't natural born, I do believe something like this is very necessary if any of them hope to become effective programmers. It's not impossible for them, as the study implies, but does require taking into account how the mind works (which we know now thanks to modern neuroscience), how it is malleable, and then designing an instructional course around that understanding.

Additionally, trying to educate the 'goats', the second group, at the same pace as the 'sheep' is going to fail. It simply takes more effort and more time for their minds to adjust, for things to 'click', for their neural pathways to rewire. Especially when that the thing that is getting rewired is their fundamental need to grok meaning amongst the relatively 'meaningless' rules that programming consists of. They're not a lost cause, but trying to educate them with the same curriculum and pace is.

Finally, the programming instruction should, as you imply, be bottom-up exploratory, not top-down memorize-apply-repeat. Part of the problem may also be that people with weaker working memories have a harder time with the academic approach to learning, even project-based ones. One of my favorite pieces of anecdotal evidence for this is from a story Paul Graham linked from 'Beating the Averages' [0].

So, given that it takes significantly more time and effort for the second group, it is all the more imperative that they start earlier, as early in life as possible. As soon as they can read and type, basically.

And in order to increase the amount of time per day that such students can spend practicing programming, it may also be worth delaying math education, or integrating it with programming education. Something's gotta give. No more pen and paper math, or even calculator math, if possible, rather learn how construct and solve math problems in code.

That may sound extreme, but given where the world is going [1], I think nothing should be off the table when it comes to teaching people, even (especially) the 'goats', to code. Even if they go on to non-programmer jobs, the ability to think both abstractly and concretely simultaneously, and the ability to handle meaninglessness, are both supremely valuable, no matter what you endeavor.

0. http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html

1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...

colmmacc• 14 years ago

I think you're on to something. When musical students are learning to be accompanists, a very common question is "how do I know what chords to play?" and there's no real answer. There's nothing more than the intuition and taste that evolves after trying many many chords many many times, to different melodies, and it somehow - mysteriously - "clicking" eventually. Eventually you just get to know.

Similarly, when learning to be a Jazz soloist, students are encouraged to practice the great solos from Jazz legends of history over and over, by rote - just keep doing it. Eventually an aptitude develops and the student just gets to reach in and feel for why a particular set of notes might be chosen, or a certain ornament here, a pause there. Somehow, this can then develop into their own particular style and personality too, and evolve beyond mere emulation.

As musicians progress, they begin to develop higher and higher level abstractions for music; being able to use subtle nuance to relate complicated lines of melody, harmony and counterpoint is one example. Another practical example is how musicians over time develop better models for music itself. There's a natural progression; a novice will struggle to play even a familiar melody on their one instrument, an experienced musician will be able to play it with ease on more than one instrument - even if they have never played it before on that instrument, a master musician will be able to transpose the melody into a different key, rework it, add nuance ... and so on. At the beginning the novice can only model the ordered movement of fingers, but the master is modeling relative pitch changes, fluid timings, potential note substitutions and so on.

I find programming to be similar. With a range that goes from being able to type in a hello world program in a procedural language, to higher-orders of thinking required to model concurrent functional systems and have a see that a tiny defmacro might be the best way to re-work a whole piece. There is a progression, and it's intrinsically mysterious how the mental models work, but it's clear that they come with practice.

Through this lens, "Talent" might best be thought of as "An innate willfulness for practicing" rather than some genetically encoded aptitude for the task at hand. There are many communities where musical education is essentially mandatory, and near enough to anybody can become a good musician if they are required to practice. Some militaries arbitrarily assign soldiers to pipe regiments, treat it as a learnable task, and make them get on with it - and it works.

It may be well worth looking at how music is thought, and seeing if there are any dividends for the educating of programming.

steve89184• 14 years ago

I completely disagree.

I firmly believe that either you are born with the ability to be a programmer or you're not. That's not saying that it's good or bad, but I believe a lot of it is just how your brain is configured. It's as innate as the ability to shoot baskets, or throw a football, or as innate as gaining energy when interacting with people (extrovert) vs losing energy when interacting with people (introvert).

Case in point: there are some people who are extremely smart, but don't have the ability to visualize things like a map in their head. I know someone who loves cars, has been into cars since he was a teenager, and loves driving. However, for the life of him, he can't read a map. He's not dumb at all, he's very intelligent and excellent with computers. But he has no ability to visualize things in his head and spin them around. So when he's given instructions on where to go, he needs landmarks, ie. "Turn left at the McDonald's and turn right when you get to the 4th traffic light." He can't process "Go north on Main Street, and then head East along Central Ave."

I believe programming is the same way. There's a type of inner mental gymnastics that you need to do in order to program well, because a lot of the things are very cerebral. Some people just can't do it. I'm not saying that they can't be taught how to program to an adequate level, but the fact that it so goes against the mesh of how their thought process works, it just won't be enjoyable to them. They will never be better than adequate.

Of course, most of us here probably can't picture that, so many of you might think I'm wrong. But put it in another perspective. We can all be taught to throw a football perfectly. But does that mean we'll be any good at it? Probably not. If we don't have the physical ability to throw a football more than 10-15 yards (like me), will it be fun for us? Probably not. But if you were a football player, hanging out with a bunch of other football players, you wouldn't understand why everyone can't throw a football more than 40 yards.

The same goes for Sales. I've come to learn from my friends who are salesmen that the sales cycle is largely algorithmic. So it can be taught. But getting out in front of customers every day, chit-chatting, engaging them, etc, is something that many of us simply aren't built to do. It takes a certain personality type to actually enjoy this. And there are plenty of them that do enjoy this and make vast sums of money. But if I were put in that position, I would hate every second, and would likely get fired.

So yes, programming can be taught, but I truly believe that there is an innate mental configuration that determines whether or not you can digest and learn the information and whether you'll be good at it, and more importantly whether or not you'll actually enjoy it.

angrycoder• 14 years ago

Comments like this really undermine what it means when someone is good at something, be it coding, throwing a ball, writing, what have you.

It is not a matter of being born with it. It isn't a matter of being smart.

It is all fucking work. It is never being satisfied. Its trying so hard and getting so pissed off that you throw the ball in the dumpster, that you smash your fist into the keyboard and walk away, that you tear up the papers and throw them in trash. But you always come back, because you won't let it beat you. You have to know how it works. You have to know how they do that thing you saw them do. You want to do it like they do. You want to do it better.

So it isn't pixie dust, it isn't innate ability, it isn't being smart. It is all fucking work.

city412• 14 years ago

In my experience, the people who "get" programming took it up as a kid. If your first program was written in CS 101, then you will not be a good programmer. I've yet to meet anyone who bucks this trend.

araneae• 14 years ago

When I took cs 100 as a freshman in college, I had never programmed before. I was in the "bottom hump." I would have failed that little quiz if I took it my first semester.

Unlike every other discipline, programming is a completely different way of thinking from what we're exposed to in public schooling. It takes time for your brain to change the way it thinks.

It's not impossible to learn; I learned. It just took me more than one semester of being exposed to something for the very first time. The reason for the two humps are people who have been exposed to programming and those who have not; it's why it appears in intro classes but not in the later ones.

Volpe3• 14 years ago

I'm curious how this 'born programmer' thing works.

So you are basically saying there is a gene (or sequence of genes) that predisposes you to programming. Could you elaborate on how that might work?

Twin studies have shown a lot about personality being more genetic that was thought before. But I don't know of any brain studies that have linked knowledge/intellectual capacity to genetics... Do you have a reference?

Or is it literally as you say, just a belief? like "I firmly believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster"

edanm• 14 years ago

"Children don't know any better so can just learn this way."

This sentence made me think. The image of the brilliant programmer who got his start at the age of 12 has always been, in my mind, proof that some people are born with programming talent and some aren't (not to say they can't develop it).

But what if, the only difference is that someone happened to start programming at a young age because he was interested it for some irrelevant reason, and because he was young, he learned it much more easily, in much the same way kids learn languages more easily than adults.

An interesting idea. In the real world, people's ability is probably a factor of both these things.

sassafras• 14 years ago

Teaching is hard.

I understand the impetus to filter out students that are less naturally inclined to it, and if your goal is to establish something of a programming conservatory, then administering a test like this would be an effective barrier. However, I think perhaps more advantageous reading of these results would be to recognize that the ability for students to construct these mental models is the single most important foundation in their education.

Anecdotally, I have had some experience teaching non-programmers basic programming skills at the university level, and it's absolutely the case that some kids, even bright ones, struggle greatly with these constructs at first. They look at the symbols and freeze, intimidated by the arcane expressions, and control flow is often non-intuitive to them. To me at least, that's a pedagogical challenge, not a lost cause. You should have seen the exclamations of wonder and excitement when some of them finally got it, once a particular way of illustrating it stuck for them.

gatlin3• 14 years ago

I studied to become a computer science teacher. I have not finished my certification for various reasons but I have some limited field work under my belt along with numerous discussions and readings. And, of course, my anecdotal but legitimate experience in public schooling.

Let's get one thing straight: the problem is bad teachers. My mentor once said it kind of sucks that UTeach was only available to UT students and by extension those who statistically succeeded in traditional schooling because they are usually the least acquainted with the system's failures.

That "test" they show inside is bullshit, first of all. If they showed that to me as a completely green 11 year old without explaining the syntax or semantics of what was going on, I'd probably have to ask some clarifying questions. And, I think it goes without saying, if the professor is the type of teacher to go into a class with the expectation that half the class will fail, I'd probably have shaky confidence and would hesitate to ask questions since everyone is quickly cast into a mold of either "have" or "have not." I've taken math courses before by these people.

Many so-called "gifted" math students (and we're all students) are great with applied math but are just as stumped by theory as everyone else (anecdotal). Testosterone and typical youthful arrogance turns classrooms into settings hostile to people aren't extremely competitive and who are somewhat unsure of themselves. Combine this with a teacher who was once one of the cocky ones and a few snide remarks about how some students "just don't get it" and what you have is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If your students fail to learn, it means you did not teach them adequately. Learning is the product of the work of learners: you have to give them the proper resources to work with. Humans are exceptionally capable. Children are extremely inquisitive and interested in so many mundane things; they can be taught math. This is beaten out of them as they get older and they're told there is a cap to what they can accomplish.

Bah. Humbug.

A good set of resources for anyone looking to teach programming and/or computer science is CS Unplugged (http://csunplugged.org/). No computers. Much of it relies on human interaction. It's fun, it's versatile, and most importantly it distills the important parts of computer science while shedding the stuff that gets in the way: confusing, advanced user interfaces; arcane terminology and confusing history; and the stigma that a computer brings to those who've never worked with them before.

malingo• 14 years ago

I think the CS Unplugged approach has a tremendous amount of potential, particularly with its intended audience (primary school). In my 3rd grade class in 1986, one day the teacher told us that she had a loaf of sliced bread in a bag, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jam, and a knife. She asked each student to write, on a sheet of paper, instructions for making a PBJ sandwich. When all the students had finished, the teacher followed each set of instructions exactly as written. It was amazing and hilarious to see the literal interpretations. I remember it very clearly because I was one of the students who gave incomplete instructions, and it was a minor blow to my ego because I was one of the smart kids. It was also my first programming lesson.

For young students, simple activities like these (and other communication / language exercises like sentence diagramming) can have significant benefits later in their education. I don't think introductory CS education should be completely replaced by non-computer exercises, but it's no surprise that many HS students and college freshmen don't "get it" when the first thing they're exposed to is a pile of code.

neilparikh• 14 years ago

About the PBJ exercise, last semester (I'm in grade 10 right now), we had to do the same thing in Chemistry, except for a lab. It was teach us to provide detailed instructions in the lab write-ups. Almost no one in the class had detailed enough instructions. It worked like a charm. After that, on the rest of my labs, I went in a lot of detail in the instructions. I have to agree that it is a great way of teaching, and it would be amazing if every student encountered it at least once in their schooling. Especially at a younger age, it would instill an attention to detail in the student, which would serve him well for the rest of his life.

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

You're a direct target for the article. Quoting: "brighteyed beginners who believe that the old ones must have been doing it wrong"

People have been trying and failing for 40 years to improve CS teaching. Granted, most professors don't try and just teach the way it's always been taught, but some, like you, do.

The big question then becomes: is this an impossible problem, or simply a very hard one? When you start teaching, you will find that a certain percentage of your students fail to "get it". Will this be your fault? Probably not. At the very least, to "get it" requires effort, and some of your students won't put in that effort, and you can't force them to. There are many ways you can encourage the effort, but you can't force it.

What we can do, though, is shift the goalposts. Turn a 70% failure rate into a 30% one into a 10% one into a 2% one, et cetera. It looks like csunplugged is one of those tools that will shift those goalposts.

gatlin3• 14 years ago

To start, I agree with you 100% on all accounts. Some students may truly never succeed but I think that by declaring the case closed and assuming it's purely a function of student ability, we lose out on valuable information about humans learn because: what if that's wrong?

The fact that the goalposts can be moved is awesome and a testament to what can happen if we assume that it's a communication or motivation problem, not student ability.

There are lots of fringe students who just think oddly. Living in cooperative housing in Austin has really driven this home. They require odd teachers.

jseliger• 14 years ago

This Atlantic article has a lot on what makes good teachers and why it's so important to find them: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak... .

In the vast majority of schools in the U.S., however, it's almost impossible to fire teachers after two to three years of employment; in many schools, it's virtually impossible to fire them even before.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

Thanks for the CS Unplugged link. The program looks very cool!

calloc• 14 years ago

I worked as a TA at my university for a while (under-grad TA too ... was a blast, me and the prof got along really well, and I knew the material extremely well and could teach) and the hump mentioned is true. I once used to believe that everyone could learn how to program, if you can write down steps for making toast in the morning you know how to program, but some people just couldn't get it.

There was some mental disconnect that didn't allow them to grasp certain key features required for programming. No matter how you explain it to them, no matter how you tried to change the model to help them. I spent a lot of time with the professor I was TA'ing for trying to understand why, trying to understand what we were missing that could help these students understand. Stuff like scope, pointers, references were some of the difficult topics, which to me come almost naturally they felt it hard to wrap their brains around.

There were students that didn't get it but they could fake the knowledge required and could get the end result but not understand why that was the end result. They did okay on the programming questions, but when it came to knowledge of what was going on they couldn't explain it.

I felt terrible having to fail students, I felt even more terrible when I could see on their face that they had tried their absolute best. I don't think I could go into teaching unless I taught uper-level classes so that I didn't have to deal with the great disappointment and filtering of students. The look on a students face as he was sitting in my office during TA hours and he still wasn't able to grasp the concept of pointers made me feel really sad. I don't think I can deal with that again.

gatlin3• 14 years ago

I was an undergrad TA for a semester as well. I think most of my criticisms are more applicable during early childhood development. Students get into their own self-fulfilling prophecies about what they can do and by college are quite good at sabotaging themselves.

That said, I should have reasoned about pointers by simply handing them a map to a building and saying "this tells you how to get to the building. It's a pointer. The building actually has what you want. This cannot because it is paper."

Perhaps framing that "ceci n'est pas une pipe" picture on the class wall would help, too.

jerf• 14 years ago

As I recall, people have attempted to replicate the results this blog post is based on and the result was debatable. Which is to say, not that they were completely unreplicable, but that under further investigation debate has intensified. It isn't clear that this methodology actually works, but it also was not conclusively destroyed. It's probably not a good scientific base to draw a lot of conclusions on right now.

gwern• 14 years ago

That is correct - the authors themselves failed to replicate the results. I kept some notes over the years (saw this OP in 2006); from http://www.gwern.net/Notes#the-camel-has-two-humps

...replications of the test have had issues; from http://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV78Bornat.pdf:

> "We now report that after six experiments, involving more than 500 students at six institutions in three countries, the predictive effect of our test has failed to live up to that early promise.”

And http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009...

> “A test was designed that apparently examined a student’s knowledge of assignment and sequence before a first course in programming but in fact was designed to capture their reasoning strategies. An experiment found two distinct populations of students: one could build and consistently apply a mental model of program execution; the other appeared either unable to build a model or to apply one consistently. The first group performed very much better in their end-of-course examination than the second in terms of success or failure. The test does not very accurately predict levels of performance, but by combining the result of six replications of the experiment, five in UK and one in Australia. We show that consistency does have a strong effect on success in early learning to program but background programming experience, on the other hand, has little or no effect.”

snitzr• 14 years ago

// The solution test in JavaScript

var a = 10, b = 20; // Declare variable values

a = b; // Assign b to a

console.log(a); // Output a to the console

console.log(b); // Output b to the console

// Log: 20

Simucal• 14 years ago

Eh, that test seemed like it could be unintuitive to those that have never had programming exposure before.

How are they to know that "=" is assignment and not testing equality? I guess you could glean that from the context where they immediately ask you the values of the variables after the operation but I could see someone misinterpreting the semantics of that operator.

msbarnett• 14 years ago

The point of the test wasn't to determine whether or not people who had never been exposed to programming could correctly divine what operation '=' performs in C.

Rather, the idea was to see whether or not, over the course of 20 or so questions, their answers indicated that, whatever they had decided '=' did, right or wrong, they applied their conclusion in a consistent manner.

Thus it was irrelevant whether or not they got the semantics of the operator right; what was important was determining whether or not they had operated as though operators in general have semantics, or whether they operated as though things behave essentially randomly.

It's more or less an attempt to determine whether the test-taker behaves as though the universe is a rational and understandable place or not.

_delirium• 14 years ago

This is sometimes called "procedural literacy" or "operational literacy" (http://grandtextauto.org/2004/06/02/procedural-literacy-an-i...), a sort of meta-programming-literacy that isn't literacy in any specific programming language (or even necessarily programming at all), but rather the ability to reason about how systems behave in rational, programmed manners.

seanalltogether• 14 years ago

If i were a complete noob to programming I could definitely see any of the following as possibly true.

a = 20 b = 20

a = 20 b = 10

a = 20 b = 0

cbr2• 14 years ago

This is a test with multiple right answers. If you have a consistent model in your head (say, X=Y swaps the values of X and Y) and apply it through out, you get full marks. They found that it was people who were consistent who did well in the class.

scj• 14 years ago

I wonder what the result of the test would be if it were written:

a <- 10;

b <- 20;

a <- b;

neilk• 14 years ago

I agree that there probably is a sharp distinction between people who can keep very rigid rules in their head, and project forwards to anticipate what will happen, and lastly also reason backwards from a desired state to figure out the necessary instructions.

The question is whether this can be taught. When I read the study I see another possible conclusion; that we haven't sufficiently prepared everyone for the basic reality of computing -- that this is about arbitrary machine rules, and how to think about them.

Some of us may come into the world having that 'mechanistic' worldview, or perhaps some early experiences teach it to some earlier than others.

But we're evolved to deal with organic environments. Where precise definition and full knowledge aren't possible, so instead we have fuzzier categories and flexible responses. Where everything intelligent in the environment can be negotiated with, using empathy. In programming 101 you have to abandon that mindset.

drumdance• 14 years ago

FWIW I remember having a hard time understanding equations when I first learned them in algebra. I remember that most of the class argued with the teacher about it. Eventually I was able to grok it, of course, but the average person doesn't get much beyond algebra.

Also, assignment is rather strange concept relative to math education. I don't remember any test where we had to create an algorithm. Variables where things you solved for, not tools.

tylerritchie• 14 years ago

I recall reading about a doctoral student or new professor who was teaching an intro computer science course and the whole while all of his peers were telling him that his course was too difficult for the dolts he had as students. (I can't find the article with what little I remember) By having his students complete much harder, smaller homework than normal (I think?) he was able to push his students farther in the one term than most would be able to get in several.

As the final exam approached the instructors asked his peers to go over the exam he had written up to which they replied something like, "you can't give this to your class, it's too hard and they will all fail and that will make you look bad." The instructor was worried, decided his students could hack it and gave them the exam despite of peer unease. Upon grading the exam, a higher than "normal" proportion (as measured from years previous) of the class left with higher grades and greater grasp of material.

Now hopefully someone knows what I'm talking about so I can re-read that account.

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

I am willing to bet a largeish sum of money that had such a test been around for literacy sometime in 1870 when mass education in the uk started in earnest, we would have found a double hump of people who had a consistent mental model of sentence construction, story arcs, past and future tenses.

The fact almost everyone has same mental model now is down to very early age education. When your parents are literate you will be too.

It's possible this test could be done today in countries with terribly low rates of literacy

zerohp• 14 years ago

My guess is that some students never really let go of mathematics. Without this step, you cannot even begin to form a mental model of how the machine evaluates an imperative program.

Students with no experience programming may be better off starting with a language like Haskell.

drblast• 14 years ago

  int a = 10;
  int b = 20;
  a = b;

  The new values of a and b are:  False!

All that example would really measure is who has had previous programming experience.

This is obviously a teaching failure.

I don't accept that there are certain things people "just don't get." Watch the documentary "Waiting for Superman," about some heroic teachers who didn't accept that either and did something about it.

pauljonas• 14 years ago

Exactly.

Way back in the 1980s, when I was an undergrad, just switched majors from Journalism to Computer Science, I had a professor that tossed this very exercise out during class, my 1st class (which we quickly learned Fortran, then Pascal at a slower pace, titled "Intro to Programming and Algorithms I"). Except he named the variables BARF and BEER. And led everyone to believe that if BARF = 3 and BEER = 47 and then BARF = BEER, that their storage contents would be reversed. Nodding his head and asking if this was correct -- to which the entire class raised its hand except for the very few (this was 1983 mind you) who had some experience who sat smugly by, knowing the punchline already.

I instinctively also raised my hand, but had an inkling that something was askew, and in a snap, I got it, before he "played CPU" and scribbled an line-by-line execute process on the chalkboard. It might sound trite, but it was a thrilling note, to realize something logical that your brain short-circuits. Today, in languages, you can write something like "a, b = b, a", giving you that sugar sparing temporary variable and confirmed my choice to pursue a computer science degree.

That "aha" moment was repeated when learning about pointers, recursion, regular expressions, etc.…

But I wonder, the way my 1st teacher presented it, if the way he stoked and kindled the curiosity fueled and whetted an aptitude for programming. Not that it made me super-rock-star-programmer but it certainly led me on a quest that resulted in semi-successful (I mean I have made a living, but not built things that sold for millions and billions :)) career. Contrast that to advanced math classes I had where the professors were arrogant a-holes, seemingly solely interested in showcasing their intellectual chops.

cbr2• 14 years ago

> All that example would really measure is who has had previous programming experience.

This test is intended only for people with no previous programming experience. From the 2006 paper: "none had any previous contact with programming, and that all had enough school mathematics to make the equality sign familiar".

lurker17• 14 years ago

"Waiting for Superman" is a thinly veiled ad for charter schools.

pnathan2• 14 years ago

I've worked with freshman CS students.

The aggregate breaks down like this, loosely:

20% succeed, always. Hackers/nerds, basically.

80% might succeed. They don't have the talent. They succeed or fail on teacher's competence and their own hard work and background.

20% fail, always. Cheaters, people who are constitutionally incapable of getting it, misplaced students, people with health issues, etc.

The 80% is what a teacher can affect. If they don't have the thinking (math/logic) background or the curiosity, they probably won't do well.

Teaching is hard. It's probably the hardest task I've ever done.

hornbaker• 14 years ago

Harder than percentages?

Sorry, couldn't resist. :)

pnathan2• 14 years ago

Yep! Type in haste, repent at leisure.

10/80/10 would be how I would break it down.

skybrian• 14 years ago

60%, presumably.

dpkendal• 14 years ago

Aside: I think it would be better were the animals the other way around: sheep aren't very smart (they have a tendency to start following one another for no real reason and this can quickly build up into a stampede) but goats are intelligent, curious creatures, much like programmers.

hluska• 14 years ago

In 1995, I used to tutor my classmates in a first year computer science course. I noticed that the people I tutored always had a bad attitude towards programming. I used to hear (and have to deal with) objections like, "this is stupid" or "this is boring"...

In retrospect, I don't know why I put up with all of that. I think it was 18 year old Greg's way of meeting girls...:)

I wonder if attitude towards programming is responsible for the distribution? Seems to me that people either love programming or loathe it - there isn't a whole lot of middle ground.

paulhauggis• 14 years ago

it's funny. I met a guy that had a PHD in computer science. He not only didn't really know how to develop software, but he didn't know anything about the internal makings of a computer (CPU, HD, etc).

sicxu• 14 years ago

Everybody learns natrual language, yet large number of people cannot learn programming language. It sounds like learning programming language is harder than learning natrual language. This is not intuitive to me. A lot of concept in natrual language are much more abstract and difficult to understand than the assignment concept. Even the leap from one apple, two apple to one, two is a much bigger conceptual leap. I see the story as a failure in education.

vectorpush• 14 years ago

In my experience, the biggest barrier to students grasping CS concepts has been an aversion to parsing errors. I've seen students slowly melt down as errors and warnings thrown up by the compiler/interpreter slowly chip away at their sanity. It's almost as if these students take it as a personal insult that the computer isn't behaving as expected and their snowballing frustrations preclude any opportunity for them to learn. The problem only gets worse as the class progresses because the topics grow in complexity but the student's strategy for dealing with problems (frustration/agitation/resentment) remains ineffective.

tokenadult2• 14 years ago

The date of this interesting submission (haven't I seen this on HN before?) is Jul 14, 2006. What has happened since then? What follow-up research has there been on the methods of first-time undergraduate introduction to programming courses? (If I remember correctly, someone on HN has pointed to follow-up papers by the same author in some earlier HN thread, but what I would especially like to see is attempts at replication by other researchers

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

and attempts by other researchers to look at the problem from other points of view.)

There are quite a few undergraduate disciplines in which it is assumed that most first-year undergraduates will not continue studying the discipline. In some disciplines that is considered a bug, but in some that is considered a feature. It's too bad that many undergraduates registering for a first-year course don't know that their professors don't expect most learners in the class to succeed. What would college enrollments in different subjects look like if there were more disclosure of that pessimistic attitude?

(Basis of knowledge: I have one son who is an adult now, the child of two nonprogrammer parents who is now a computer science major, who first learned programming through a CTD course in programming taught by T. J. Leone

http://tjleone.com/

(who now offers a different course, based on different materials) and the EPGY distance learning course in C programming

http://epgy.stanford.edu/courses/cs/

and some more or less haphazard local classes in programming arranged by our homeschooling support group, which includes parents who are programmers by occupation. He was advanced in mathematics before he began his programming studies.)

NegativeOne• 14 years ago

What are the possible answers ? Both values equaling 20 sounds right to me, and I can't come up with anything else that it could mean.

tsunamifury• 14 years ago

The single concept that kept me from understanding basic coding was the mutability of variables.

After years and years of algebra teaching me that variables were inherently immutable, I automatically assumed that was a universal law that was never broken.

Then again that proves that I at least thought there was a system.

polymatter• 14 years ago

too bad they didn't introduce functional programming to you then. because in a language like Haskell, pure variables are inherently immutable.

Kilimanjaro• 14 years ago

If you don't know anything about programming then it is ok to assume a = b as a comparison, so the answer is False?, or that a can be assigned to b? left to right? right to left? who knows? how about assigning just adds the new value to the existing one and removes the assigned value? so a=30 and b=0? What's this int about, interrupt? interfere, interrogate?

This is just retarded. Tell me the rules first so I can infer on right premises.

ertdfgcb• 14 years ago

Well, part of what he said in the article was that it was more important that the student can create a consistent mental model. So even if you have no idea what the '=' means, you can infer a possible meaning from the answers and use that every time you see it (on that test).

jessepollak• 14 years ago

Does anyone know where I might find the actual test that they administered? I'd love to see if I could produce similar results..

cabalamat• 14 years ago

Suirely the correct answer is "it's impossible to tell with the information given me".

mhartl• 14 years ago

It's interesting that this gets highlighted as an example that baffles the 'non-programmers':

    int a = 10;
    int b = 20;
    a = b;

This looks obvious to an experienced developer, but it is a clear-cut case of horrible notation. The first two uses of '=' are mere variable bindings, whereas the third is a mutation. Using '=' for bindings is dubious but defensible, since

    int a = 10

does indeed guarantee that a = 10 in a mathematical sense. Using '=' for mutation is crazy, though, since assignment isn't commutative:

    a = b

and

    b = a

are not equivalent. The pinnacle of confusion can be seen in the following abomination:

    x = x + 1

This looks like an algebraic equation with no solution. So, you take people who have been taught to use '=' for mathematical equality their whole lives, and now they're supposed to swallow these absurdities? No wonder people are confused.

What we're seeing here is essentially a pun: the use of '=' for at least three different things (binding, mutation, and mathematical equality). To my knowledge, only Lisp gets this right (although there must be others). For example, in Scheme we would have

    (let ((a 10)
          (b 20)))

for bindings,

    (set! a b)

for mutation, and

    (= a b)

for equality comparison—three ideas, three different notations.

I'm certainly prepared to believe the hypothesis that some people will just never 'get' programming, but we should consider the possibility that bad notation is part of the problem. Given how entrenched it is, changing notation might be unwise, but at the least we can acknowledge and explain ambiguous notation rather than treating it as self-explanatory.

gruseom• 14 years ago

The pinnacle of confusion can be seen in the following abomination: x = x + 1

Bill Wadge invented the dataflow language Lucid in the early 1970s by pondering this very paradox. He wrote a nice series of blog posts about it that begins at http://billwadge.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/lucid-the-origins.

His insight was that x = x + 1 isn't contradictory once you recognize that the two x's have implicit temporal subscripts. That is, "the value of x at time t+1 = the value of x at time t, plus 1". Make that temporal dimension explicit in the language and you can go back to having a nice equational semantics.

It's interesting, though, and perhaps germane to your point, that this insight turned out to lead far away from mainstream languages.

I've come to the conclusion that math and programming are very different things because math isn't executable. Programs have to run on a physical machine, math doesn't. The "physical" part changes everything. As someone pointed out in a blog post recently, even programs written in the purest most side-effect-free languages have side-effects when they run. I suspect that functional programming ultimately runs aground on this discrepancy - i.e. on the intrinsic imperativeness of the machine. The "x = x+1" paradox can be seen as a distillation of this imperativeness.

Perhaps we should teach programming not as math but as a kind of mechanics.

apu• 14 years ago

From a comment I made 2 years ago when this paper was brought up:

I've been fairly skeptical of this paper ever since reading Alan Kay's rebuttal: http://www.secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp

I trust Kay much more than these authors on matters of computer science, teaching, or ideas in general.

To expand a bit, I've since mentored over a dozen students and I've found that in most cases of students who couldn't program well, the issue was "further upstream." That is, there was some misunderstanding at a more fundamental level that was preventing them from continuing forward. Once that issue was fixed, they rapidly catch up to where they should be.

Groxx2• 14 years ago

From the draft article:

>There was an attempt to administer the test to another 30 or so students on a foundation (pre- degree) programming course at Middlesex University. That administration failed, because the students – rightly, in our opinion – were incensed at the conduct of their teaching and the ar- rangements for their study, and simply refused to do anything that wasn’t directly beneficial to themselves.

Uh... what? What is the "conduct of their teaching and arrangements for their study"?

That random bit of information is followed later by this:

>3.3 Third administration

Because of what we found on the first and second administrations, there was no third administration.

That doesn't follow at all. The first quote states the students refused to take the test, while the second states a final test would have been valueless. I very much doubt that it wouldn't have had value, as it could strengthen or weaken their claims, so I'm forced to conclude the students refused to take an exam? Something doesn't seem right in this classroom.

Ultimately though, without any information about how things were taught, I'm not sure this study tells us much. With a lot of studies across a variety of teaching styles we might be able to extrapolate something, but a single one just throws doubt on the methods of teaching which is a massive un-controlled and un-known variable to the whole system.

leoedin• 14 years ago

I had a Matlab programming class in my first year of a mechanical engineering degree. What was painfully obvious to me then was that the people with programming experience (some of us had done some sort of computing or computer science course at school) excelled - I got 100% in the course, many of my friends got 95%+ (which in the UK, where 80% is considered excellent, is a very good mark).

Many others really, really floundered. They had no clue what they were doing. I finished the task in about a 1/3 of the time, others were working right up to the deadline and ended up getting 50% or so.

I'm not an excellent programmer. My skills might be above the average in mechanical engineering, but that really isn't saying much. I'd bet that double hump is less to do with some innate ability and more to do with exposure to programming at a younger age.

aklemm• 14 years ago

I passed the test. w00t!

user24• 14 years ago

can a moderator remove the "coding horror" prefix from the headline? It adds nothing but brand.

michaelochurch• 14 years ago

I alluded to this (believing it was true) and was rebuffed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434582 . Doesn't seem to be the case.

I think that many more people can learn how to program, and become good programmers at that. It's true now that the majority (at least 80%) of programmers are incompetent, but I think that has more to do with environment, tooling, economics, and the short half-life (5-6 years) of a software developer, than intrinsic limitations on ability. I wrote about this here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector... . The tools and freedom that a developer needs to become good (1.5+) are simply not available in average software jobs.

I think the big problem is that we teach programming using languages like Java, which are actually very complicated. There's a lot of information in "public static void main(String[] args)" that just seems like line noise to a novice, and that people shouldn't even be exposed to until they develop the taste to know when to use OOP and when not (and that takes years, IMO). In teaching, we should start with simple languages like Scheme so we aren't requiring people to lex and parse and generate .class files in their heads before they even know what those terms mean.

Scheme and Python are better starting languages, in my opinion, and we should be starting programming education around age 6. We can (and should) expose growing programmers to C, Scala, Clojure, and Haskell later.

Also, starting with complex languages and tools (Java-style) means we have to teach in an inverted way. In your first Java exercise, you don't write a program, you write a class. Why? No good reason. There's no intrinsic reason a program has to be a class. This sort of botched, improperly-coupled teaching produces a generation of programmers who think every program must be a class, and who produce shitty AbstractVisitorHandlerFactory programs as a result.

This is one thing that annoys me especially in the teaching of Scala-- one of the most exciting languages to come out of the past 10 years, but one that is poorly understood and generally taught quite badly. What angers me especially (I'm writing a Scala tutorial to fix some of these mistakes, probably making others in the process) is when case classes are taught after classes. For example, the O'Reilly book (which is generally quite good) covers traits (a very powerful and highly nuanced advanced OOP feature) in Chapter 4 and case classes in Chapter 6. Case classes, for the uninitiated, are immutable records (data objects) and provide a lot of niceties (automatic .equals and .hashCode, class name as constructor) for free. Since case classes are simpler than full-featured classes, they should be taught first.

The right way to teach programming is to teach the simple stuff (immutable records, referentially-transparent functions, mutable state in simple data structures) first, and then provide some insight into when and why you might want to use the more complicated stuff (OOP, type classes in Haskell, functors in OCaml).

This is the reason why people who start in functional programming usually become top-5% programmers within ~3 years and people who drink the OOP Kool-Aid almost never do. Mutable state isn't evil, and good "functional" programmers use it all the time, but if you don't start with the right (simple) default abstractions-- immutable records and referentially-transparent functions-- you are not learning how to write clean, simple, maintainable code. Not only is this an important engineering skill on its own, but it's also important for the purpose of growth, because reading good code (one's own and others') is a great way to improve as a programmer.

MikeMacMan• 14 years ago

This makes sense. I majored in Japanese in college. There were 3 kinds of students in our language classes:

1. Students for whom it came naturally 2. Students who could be competent if they worked really hard 3. Students who, no matter how hard they tried, weren't going to learn to speak Japanese. Wasn't gonna happen.

Bad teaching methods might result in some #2 types being mischaracterized as hopeless #3's, but I think no amount of pedagogical innovation can overcome the fact that some people just can't do certain things. (Of course, it could be a function of age and brain wiring, since all citizens of Japan, even the stupid ones, have no trouble learning Japanese.)

chl• 14 years ago

"Two years ago we appeared to have discovered an exciting and enigmatic new predictor of success in a first programming course. We now report that after six experiments, involving more than 500 students at six institutions in three countries, the predictive effect of our test has failed to live up to that early promise. We discuss the strength of the effects that have been observed and the reasons for some apparent failures of prediction."

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper3.pdf

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/

its_so_on• 14 years ago

if I had never had any exposure to programming, and you told me that a equals ten, b equals twenty, and a equals b, I would say that one of these three equations is obviously false (the system of three equations has no solution), you're full of shit, and probably made a mistake and expect me to put 0,0 for a and b respectively. Or I would guess randomly or ignore the question.

IF I HAD NEVER HAD ANY EXPOSURE TO PROGRAMMING.

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