Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/24/dont-believe-anyone-who-tells-you-learning-to-code-is-easy/

by sumukh1 • 12 years ago

209 180 12 years ago

There's merit in reminding people that a lot of development contains a decent amount of Googling, but I'm not sure that "knowing which code is best to copy-paste" is the main trait of coding.

What's certainly true is that learning how to code is dramatically easier than it ever has been; and is likely to get easier as time passes. Learning how to code is indeed pretty easy, knowing how to build a complex product goes beyond that, though.

darkmighty• 12 years ago

It is remarkably easier, that far I can tell. The number of "building blocks" so to speak in a programming language are quite numerous for most tasks (i.e. not core algorithms) -- something I learned quickly which frustrated me when I started programming in HS -- unlike in math where dominating elementary logic/algebra allows you to solve incredibly complex problems just by thinking hard enough, in languages/libraries tools and problems are tightly coupled, and numerous.

So often the better way is just googling, seeing examples, and a lot of copy-pasting.

demallien• 12 years ago

You know what? I don't think it is easier to learn to program now. Many years ago when I was a child and I got my first computer, it booted straight into a BASIC interpreter. The computer also came with a manual that taught you about if statements, for/next loops, gotos and gosubs. It showed you examples of how to draw to the screen and get inputs.

Compare that to today. There was nothing to install. It was all already there. There wasn't even an environment to launch, you booted into the REPL. You didn't have to hunt for tutorials on the internet, everything you needed to get started was in the manual that came with the computer. And everything in that manual was appropriate to the computer. You didn't have to worry about having the wrong version of dev environment, making the tutorial incorrect.

That's not to say that programming hasn't improved in other respects. I could spend years trying to build a basic TCP/IP stack on that old 8bit computer, which already comes pre-installed on a modern computer. I can grab a free copy of just about any language I've heard of. Huge numbers of libraries freely available allow me to stand on the shoulders of giants. But, nothing available today approaches the simplicity of that old 8 bit system for learning to program...

_RPM2• 12 years ago

" As a programmer, there is a limitless amount of stuff to learn"

I absolutely disagree with this. I learn new things at least once a week about computer science in general. No one knows everything.

"They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google"

So, she relies on S.O. for all her programming problems, what if other people don't? SO is _not_ my first choice anymore. Man pages are such high quality.

jhspaybar• 12 years ago

I was recently going through the man pages on how to manipulate the route table and thought to myself, "man, these are kind of lacking compared to what I usually see." I get to the bottom and in the Bugs section is a single sentence, "This page is incomplete." Good times :)

yen223• 12 years ago

"As a programmer, there is a limitless amount of stuff to learn"

"I learn new things at least once a week about computer science in general. No one knows everything."

How do these statements contradict each other?

_RPM2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean, but I am saying that there is not a limit to what you can learn, as programmer.

ef43• 12 years ago

Also see Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years".

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

octonion• 12 years ago

Coding is easy.

illicium• 12 years ago

But software engineering is hard.

ef43• 12 years ago

They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste. And they don’t let you in on a big secret: that there is no mastery, there is no final level. The anxiety of feeling lost and stupid is not something you learn to conquer, but something you learn to live with.

Just because you haven't achieved mastery yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It takes a very long time.

Until you've worked with masters, you may doubt they exist. But they do.

enraged_camel2• 12 years ago

On the other hand, most masters will not call themselves that, and will resist being labeled as such. Because ironically, true mastery can only be achieved through humility.

krisgenre2• 12 years ago

No, I don't think so. There are many masters in music who can be quite arrogant, don't see why it can't be applied to programming. Also, those people who don't call themselves 'masters' may not do so for the sake of their public image. Once you start working with them you'll know what they really think.

bpatrianakos• 12 years ago

If you want to be super technical, sure. But in the context of this article that quote rings true. The masters really are surprisingly few in our field. At least the sort of masters I think you're talking about. In my experience most programmers have a sense of imposter syndrome that is very tough to crack so including that quote in the article was something I liked and think is important for other developers to hear. The amount of knowledge and experience needed for true mastery is so deep and wide that in practical terms I would agree with that quote completely.

greenyoda3• 12 years ago

"The masters really are surprisingly few in our field."

Contrary to what some readers here might expect, most highly competent developers don't have blogs or start their own companies. Most of the talented and experienced engineers who work in the bowels of Google optimizing search algorithms, or at Boeing writing avionics software or at Oracle designing database systems pursue their craft in obscurity and anonymity. I work with master programmers every day who nobody has ever heard of.

Having been on HN for a few years, I've recognized several of the people here as being masters of their craft based on the depth of understanding and experience that's evident in the words they've written.

"In my experience most programmers have a sense of imposter syndrome..."

I think that the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which "incompetent people will tend to overestimate their own level of skill" and "fail to recognize genuine skill in others"[1] is much more prevalent in our field than impostor syndrome (the opposite phenomenon).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

ScottBurson2• 12 years ago

The OP has it right. I've been programming almost 40 years, and I think it's safe to say I've achieved a certain level of mastery. But when I'm working on something hard, I still feel lost and stupid. I wouldn't have it any other way! If I don't feel challenged, I get bored really really fast.

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

Do you feel a difference in the way you handle the solution space exploration ? tricks or just decades-built patience ?

psyklic2• 12 years ago

I disagree with the author -- I never feel lost and stupid. There is always a way of bringing an idea to life, even if there are compromises and tradeoffs.

But nowadays, I am forced to rely on third-party libraries. These libraries often change constantly and have "in-development" nuances. So, the OP regrettably is correct that searching the Internet is a requirement for working on modern applications.

I do reminisce about the pre-Internet days, when all I needed was my brain and a simple reference book!

ef43• 12 years ago

If those libraries are open source, you can still do it. ;-)

cordite• 12 years ago

My mom taking python on coursers constantly feels lost and stupid. She's doing it again even though she passed last time.

I remember feeling that way when I was eleven, teaching myself. But I think this feeling goes away with self confidence and experience.

woah• 12 years ago

I bet the person who maintained your code felt lost and stupid though! The benefit of libraries is that the reference exists at all.

cynwoody• 12 years ago

I do reminisce about the pre-Internet days, when all I needed was my brain and a simple reference book!

Once upon a time, I had a bookcase full of three-ring binders containing plural "reference books", updated frequently via snap-open, pop-out, slide in latest version.

These days, I find Chrome's location bar far faster and more convenient than that bookcase!

She is absolutely correct about the importance of "developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google".

And as for copy-paste, when and to what extent to do that is another knack, one which will likely accompany the acquisition of the first knack.

Balgair3• 12 years ago

I'll hijack here a bit (sorry).

A good friend of mine in in a PhD program at UCLA. She's into solid-state physics and modeling. They use IgorPRO a lot in this field (oddly, also audiology). However, she can't use it a lick. She tries, she really does, but she just can't.

Why? Dyslexia. She has dyslexia. All the variables on the screen just look the same. i++ and i--, or +i and 'hi', or for() and if(). Just the same stuff to her. Its something not usually discussed, as I think most programmers don't have it so bad. 'Up to 17% of the population'[0] may have some form of dyslexia. It's something that really does impede many many people from just reading, let alone coding and programming. Does anyone know of a work-around for this at all? Thank you.

[0]http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/answers/faq

dethstar• 12 years ago

This is perhaps more fitting in one of those QA sites or as an ask hn but i did some googling for you:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9657/programm...

Balgair3• 12 years ago

Thank you!

nandemo• 12 years ago

The first google result suggests that IDEs and code-coloring might help:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9657/programm...

Out of curiosity, does she not have a problem reading (or writing) physics papers?

Balgair3• 12 years ago

Yes, of course she does. But programming also takes it's own learning curve on top of it all.

sal1800• 12 years ago

With programming, art, carpentry and many other things, you just have to accept that the first project you finish will likely not be very good and the best thing to do is to throw it away and start over.

If you can embrace that idea, you can eventually learn to code.

The goal is to understand what you are doing and why, not just blindly copy and paste code that seems to work. Break it by changing something and fix it enough times and you will gain insight about how it all goes together.

Even the most complex problems can be made easy if you can break it into smaller tasks and build up to the finish.

jv22222• 12 years ago

I've been coding PHP html css and JS for nearly 20 years and I still learn huge swathes of new information and techniques all the time. I wouldn't say I've mastered it. I'm pretty good at foreach though.

marincounty• 12 years ago

I found the free cs50 courses at Harvard helpful. I honestly didn't have the patience to sit through the videos, but I listened to the mp3's while exercising. All the buzz words started to make sense. I don't think I'll ever become a Programmer--just don't have the drive, but I can put up websites--half ass, but they are improving. Yea, I know a bit about ROR, and Django, but would never call myself a Programer, or a cutesy Coder. In terms of making a living in this field, I honetly think who you knows matters more than what you know? I guess that's the case in a lot of fields? I've never had the stomach to suck up to someone I didn't truely like. I guess you have too though?

jimbokun3• 12 years ago

I really feel like, relative to many other fields, programmers sincerely their field to be a meritocracy. They don't always live up to the ideal. For example, a lot of programming interviews used to heavily feature mathematical riddles and brain teasers. More recently this has come to be considered a bad way to evaluate potential programmers, but at least the intent was trying to find out something about the candidate's intelligence, and not just trying to make a personality fit or something.

gradys• 12 years ago

They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste"

This is a misleading simplification. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm going to elaborate anyway.

Learning to program isn't fundamentally about learning what text to type in to a box somewhere. It's about learning to think computationally. "Think computationally" is vague and doesn't mean very much to the beginner. That's because it's something you need to learn with practice.

Think about writing in normal human languages. You could say there are two things going on when you are writing an essay, for example. At one level, you are thinking about the concepts. What are your arguments? How are you going to support them? At another level, you are thinking about how to write them down -- how to encode them in a way that readers will understand.

The same distinction exists in programming. At one level, you need to think computationally. What are the inputs I have access to? How can I use them to produce the right outputs? What data structures should I use? How should I handle this edge case? At another level, you are thinking about how to write all of this down so that the computer will actually be able to do it.

Copying and pasting will help you with the second part -- figuring out how to write down the structures you come up with -- and real, experienced programmers do that all the time, but it won't help you with the first part -- figuring out what structures to write down.

enraged_camel2• 12 years ago

On the other hand, there is a lot to be said about knowing what question to ask and how to ask it. In the age of Stack Overflow, using the wrong terminology or being too specific with your question can lead to never finding that chosen, community-wiki'd answer with 500 upvotes that holds the solution to your problem (or shows you that you have been following the wrong line of inquiry, built upon the wrong set of assumptions).

jimbokun3• 12 years ago

"Learning to program isn't fundamentally about learning what text to type in to a box somewhere. It's about learning to think computationally."

But learning how to start programming isn't about that at all, even a little bit.

Writing your first program is learning what a text editor is (no, it's not quite the same as a word processor), maybe learning about the command line interface on your computer for the first time, learning about the various dependencies between the tools and libraries you need to install to get started. There is Googling and discovering tutorials that are out of date or have mistakes in them, and figuring out what to do then.

rdtsc2• 12 years ago

You need multiple things to come together. Some are abstract and general, some are more specific. You need to know the tools you are using, the capabilities of your platforms.

At some lowest level it is about solving problems and knowing how to drill down and understand requirements, split a large problem into sub-problems. In that respect it is not unlike an architect or an engineer or carpenter.

Then it comes to about learning how to translate to an intermediate mental representation. Here where you you already think about the typical language paradigms. Like someone used to object oriented design starts seeing objects, factories, inheritance hierarchies. Someone used to actor based programming (like Erlang) starts seeing actors sending messages to each other. A Haskell programmer starts thinking about type-classes (presumably, I am not one).

Then it comes down writing it. Here one needs to know the tools in detail. The specific language, platform, API. Say something object oriented at the higher level could become something in C++, Java or Python here. Here is where Google-ing helps. Knowing that say oh Python has this cool built-in module that can help me. Or yeah, I'll use a smart pointer here. Well you have to know about the smart pointers.

Then here is boring but important stuff. Knowing how to use version control. Knowing how to estimate time, communicate with team-mates. Not being stupid about security.

Anyway a lot of things have to come together to make someone a successful programmer in the general sense. Some acquire these capacities formally by going to college. Some acquire these on their own.

The interesting thing is that regardless of how it was acquired, the usual instinct is to discount it while looking back. "Oh I just write Python, here is a book on syntax, learn it and start programming". That always somehow seems easy to programmers. And I have made the that mistake. Friends and family member I have tried to show/teach programming.

alelefant• 12 years ago

"And I have made the that mistake. Friends and family member I have tried to show/teach programming."

I'm just curious, knowing what you know now, how would you go about trying to show someone how to program?

I may have that opportunity soon and I was going to suggest thinking about a simple yet everyday problem that arises, and try to make it better with an app (could be phone, web app, client app, etc).

rdtsc2• 12 years ago

I would be more patient. I would start with something they want to do, like a practical project. "make a garage door opener". Or make a "robot controller", beer brewing temperature probe with a web server, an app to teach morse code.

The more abstract aspects often become internalized through experience and through concrete examples. Say I didn't care about all the network or socket programming until I had to implement a chat-like server. Looking back thinking "oh yeah algorithms are important" but I only internalized that until I picked the wrong one and got horrible performance. Or until I started interviewing and everyone and their cousin wanted algorithms -- so yes they are important in getting a good job ;-).

Anyway this "example before abstract" is just my personal idea. Googling for example is something I do very often. Say when I get to an API section, I quickly look for example first. Man pages that have examples.

paulbaumgart• 12 years ago

I learned programming with HTML/PHP. It's great in that HTML is really easy to understand and lets you draw colorful text and pictures to the screen almost immediately. Then, you can jump to Turing-completeness with a new kind of tag, "<?PHP" that can handle form inputs and generate new HTML!

And then get them over to Python or something ASAP. PHP doesn't have enough structure for a beginner to learn good software design principles, it's best kept to just teaching a thing or two about loops and control structures.

Teaching HTML + JS is tempting, but then you kinda have to explain the whole DOM too, which just makes things complicated.

jbcurtin2• 12 years ago

Learn to question everything. Use CodeAcademy, KhanAcademy, and w3schools.com. Don't listen to people who tell you something is a horrible idea. You're far to ignorant on programming to have your own opinion and accepting someone else's will just stunt your progress.

It's like learning to speak another language; you're talking to a child. You have to tell/teach it everything about it's life. Eventually it'll be able to live by it's self.

When you're ready for application programming, look for topics on c/c++ and other languages that people seem to love. Find out what your favorite game/website is built in and see if you can replicate it.

logicchains• 12 years ago

I'm teaching a relatively mathematically-minded friend programming and I've found http://repl.it/languages/Scheme to be an excellent resource. The simple syntax and semantics of Scheme and its easy accessibility allows them to quickly develop an understanding of the fundamentals, and from there it's not much work for them to download DrRacket and start on more practical applications.

I think games are a great place to start; simple, humorous text-based adventures, for instance, are both really fun to write and teach a lot of the basics.

thrush3• 12 years ago

I've found the hardest thing for beginner programmers is being in a state where they can actually run their code. That's why I think NodeJS and Javascript are so awesome. The code just runs, better yet, Javascript (perhaps not NodeJS) can run in the browser (there's the developer console, even JSFiddle)!

philmcc2• 12 years ago

1. I try to find out something that the person already understands, so I can frame my metaphors around that.

2. Maybe I'm projecting, but I was tinkering with computers for a long time before I started learning to program. To that end, there's a lot of just intuitive understanding of software that you absorb, basic relationships like configuration files, rebooting, memory, what a browser does, what a URL variable is etc etc.

There's a lot to be said for helping a person round out this knowledge, before you start teaching them how to program.

I don't know that a person needs to know a lot about America before learning American English, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it helps. "You see, they're kind of a casual low key people, so their language has a lot of slang and elisions..."

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

I've found the hardest thing about teaching people to program has become that there is a huge learning curve between the "simple" stuff and making real progress. I've been working on a device which will level that out a bit with an easier intro level.

I've found that interpretive languages, Python, Perl, or even BASIC can be less difficult to start because you can start exploring them right away. Compiled languages are harder because of the intermediate step.

thrush3• 12 years ago

What I think is cool about programming is that if you can understand a book, like the C Programming Language for example, then you can probably program. Although, being able to understand that book may take a little more work than just reading it (you might need some supplementary material). A lot of other pieces are soft skills for becoming a professional software engineer, such as time estimation, communication, version control, etc (soft skills in that they can likely be picked up on the job).

collyw4• 12 years ago

Yes, but the coding part is usually the easiest party about being a programmer. All the other skills and knowledge you mention are what makes me far more valuable than when I started 14 years ago.

sirdogealot• 12 years ago

I only tell my friends that programming is simple as a way to encourage them to get started.

Once they have begun, I tell them "sure, basic programming is simple, but you need to think hard about what you really want to do".

That generally has a good outcome and they continue to be interested in programming and wanting to learn more about it.

If you tell an interested person straight away that "it is incredibly difficult" then you will be discouraging a large number of people before they even begin.

withdavidli• 12 years ago

And they don’t let you in on a big secret: that there is no mastery, there is no final level. The anxiety of feeling lost and stupid is not something you learn to conquer, but something you learn to live with.

One of the biggest surprises when I started to learn, LANGUAGES ARE STILL BEING UPDATED. ?_? Totally thought that was done and over with, then I come to find language/framework updates can break entire programs. First time learning Rails was when they just upgraded to 4.x and all the tutorials was in 3.x. Now that was a "FUUUUU" moment.

P.S. I thought the pictures was done quite nicely ^.^

greenyoda3• 12 years ago

Not all languages ignore backward compatibility. There's Fortran code written in the 1960s and C code written in the 1970s that will still compile correctly with today's compilers, even though these languages have evolved continually over the years.

brettgoulder• 12 years ago

If you are considering a career as a web engineer, I think the first thing you need to ask yourself, do you enjoy tying and untying knots over and over again. If you do, you probably have the right stuff to be a really good programmer.

anishkothari• 12 years ago

I've also heard web programming described as plumbing.

I wish I knew this before I started my Master's degree in IT. Programming is frustrating if you don't have an engineering background... you keep running into new problems and people telling you what you could do better.

PurplePanda• 12 years ago

I would never describe either finding new problems or people telling me what I could do better as frustrating! They are both some of my favourite things to experience!

krisgenre2• 12 years ago

Learning to code is actually easy. What's difficult is, to master it.

minikomi• 12 years ago

I would almost say.. Learning how to code is easy, learning what to code is hard.

greenyoda3• 12 years ago

Exactly. To expand on what you said:

Learning to code is easy, just as learning to write English prose is easy - kids routinely do both of these things. However, learning to be a professional software developer or a commercially successful novelist or journalist is very different from learning to code or learning to write - for most people, it requires hard work, many years of experience and learning from lots of mistakes.

R_Edward2• 12 years ago

I would further refine this to, "Learning to code is like learning to write prose: Easy to learn, and easy to do, but not so easy to do well. Especially since 'well' is at least a little bit subjective." There are plenty of people who can write well, who are not commercially successful. And there are people who are commercially successful who do not write very well at all. Cough-DanBrown-Cough.

ant_sz• 12 years ago

Programing is easy for who has already learned it. The second language is easier to learn than the first one. I think that's why programers keep telling programing is easy.

I admit that the learning curve of programing is a little steep. But isn't every skills in the world the same? Think about the first time a child learn to walk, the first time a child learn to speak. No healthy adults think these things hard to do now.

The conclusion: the programing is just like any skills in the world, they are always hard for the new beginners but become easier and easier while you are getting familiar with them. Saying if it is statically hard or not isn't an accuracy statement.

fred_durst2• 12 years ago

I've been programming for maybe too long now, but likely not nearly as long as the higher level advanced developers, but still the idea that people copy & paste code from Google/SO is horrifying. You are really just going to work on some real life project and just blindly copy some random crap you found online without even knowing what it does completely? Yikes.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

Uhm, that's how I still learn new languages. Copy, paste, modify just to get something done.

The modify part leads to more concrete questions, more Googling, more detailed reading of docs, until at some point I'm engaged enough to go back to zero and actually start learning the language from the basics.

(This doesn't work for those languages who's paradigm you first need to understand before being able to do anything, but most languages allow for hacking straightforward procedural code at the basic level.)

fred_durst2• 12 years ago

I mean this in the best way possible, but do you like actually take your mouse over to the webpage, highlight the code, copy it, and then paste it into your editor? I am genuinely curious.

taurath• 12 years ago

If you don't know what a thing does and you don't have the time to learn it, sure. A few years ago when I was making my first applications I "used" regex's off of stack overflow long before I was able to take the time to learn the syntax myself. At the time it was much more important for me to learn design and compilation than it was to go off and learn regex.

cmelbye• 12 years ago

I find it amazing how often I see comments on Stack Overflow complaining that the obvious pseudocode solution (meant as a guideline to explain the correct answer) "doesn't work". It seems like it's very common to outright copy and paste code without any sort of basic critical thinking on how to properly integrate it into one's project...

garthk• 12 years ago

It's so common, large companies have entire teams dedicated to running Black Duck scans of their software to hunt down the paste-ins lest their software become open source or their patents cross-licensed by accident.

That scenario might not be entirely possible given the terms of GPL and Apache, but that's how they talk about it.

belorn• 12 years ago

The problem such companies has is extremely similar to news papers. They constantly has journalists that copies from Wikipedia, uses images from "the Internet", and end up committing copyright infringement, for profit, in a commercial scale.

Even political parties who's slogan is more police and harsher punishment don't understand copyright. In Sweden, the extreme right just plucked some images from the internet, did not check the license, and used it in their party program and commercials. In the end, every Swedish household got sent a pirate copy.

The problem is that copyright infringement is so extremely easy to do, that it happens everywhere, and will likely keep happening regardless of scans.

wturner• 12 years ago

At the college I use to work at they had a sound arts program and they still do. They decided to change this a bit and make a foray into the 'cool' world of programming. Instead of hiring software engineers to design the course they let the previous "sound recording" course directors and a few lab instructors attempt to write the program . All 4 or so of those people had never done any real programming with the exception of one, who as far as I know has never been in a professional programming or software development environment. In short he did some SuperCollider stuff as a personal hobby and was good at teaching MaxMSP. However, this is a different beast than teaching python or IOS which is what they intended. Especially at it pertains to audio.

Eventually they wrote a course that included Python.

I assume the instructors realized what they had bitten off as last I looked Python is no longer on the official curriculum. This story actually gets much worse as they wanted to do Objective C but they originally hired a former instructor who was a DJ to learn and teach it. That guy didn't show up for work one day ..... and never did again.

gcv• 12 years ago

This is misleading. Learning to "code" or do the work horrifically called "software engineering" is definitely a huge pain in the ass. It's all about half-working fragile dependencies and outdated documentation. Don't do web programming. Don't do iOS. You can try it after you have used good tools first.

Instead, start by learning about computational processes. Use Racket — it's a stable, excellent environment. Read SICP or at least HtDP. You'll have fun. It's challenging, because it requires an adjustment to the way you think, but it is not particularly hard.

rimantas• 12 years ago

Oh, do iOS. You will know how elegant APIs look like.

oldspiceman• 12 years ago

The only useful class I took in university was first year programming.

I felt like god when I first wrote an output stream to a file. I couldn't believe it was possible. Most people didn't have those kind of feelings. I think that's the difference. You're either captivated or you're not.

_random_• 12 years ago

Then you read some science fiction and futurology forecasts and understand that there is no way future isn't going to be revolving around programming in every way. And you feel even better.

jimbokun3• 12 years ago

I have been programming a long time, and even now I often feel getting the environment set up to start something than just writing the actual code to solve the problem.

Compiler versions, dependency injection configuration files (why yes, I am a Java developer, how did you guess?), build systems, source control, dependency management, library incompatibilities, setting up a test environment, setting up and configuring databases and web servers, etc.

Maybe I don't actually spend as much time on these things as it feels like I do, but I do know futzing with this stuff when you just want to write real code to solve real problems is soul sucking and demoralizing.

So I definitely relate to the hard part of programming, beginner or not, as just getting to the point where you can actually write some code and see what it does.

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

I really see your point on that. I am a hobbiest scripter, I know HTML/CSS, dabble in PHP and Javascript and can read a lot of C.

I tried learning Ruby/Rails a while back and spent 3-4 hours just trying to get the environment setup. I finally realized that Windows 7 was not a very popular OS to learn Ruby on and gave up.

On the contrary, getting a PHP/Python/Javascript "environment" setup is no problem. Notepad + a hosting account or any Linux/Mac and you are good to go.

beemoe• 12 years ago

This comment really resonates with me. It is what I think of when I hear that quote, "Technology has the shelf life of a banana". It demotivates from starting new side projects when the old ones take such efforts just to set up again. Code can give the impression that it has some timeless value like some truth that has always existed and you have captured, but in reality code cannot "exist"(or fulfill its purpose) in isolation.

kpennell• 12 years ago

Thanks for this comment. I've found it to be spot on. It is absolutely demoralizing to spend weeks on trying to figure out env and deployment settings vs. actually making things with code. I hate dev environments so much. They destroy your will to learn.

7952• 12 years ago

So much of the time the basic environment isn't even enough. Consider writing a 3D game. You can't just load some data into a structure and then invoke render(). You have to choose the correct library that will be performant enough to work and simple enough to learn quickly. However good your code is it will be too slow if you are targeting the wrong environment. IMHO this accounts for a lot of the actual frustration of learning to code.

andrewfong• 12 years ago

To borrow from PG, treat learning to code like learning to paint (or any other creative process). You might pick up the basics pretty quickly, but the quality of your first webapp will probably be comparable to that of your first self portrait.

retrogradeorbit• 12 years ago

"They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste."

No, no, no! This always frustrates me. This is not 'coding' (maybe it is, and we should be doing less of it, and more programming). This is gluing together pre-coded snippets and trying to make it work. Continuing to do this is an impediment to getting better. Thinking that somehow this is what 'coding' is, is missing the point.

I will read a stack overflow page perhaps in a search for some direction, look at all the 'solutions' like surveying a landscape of others approaches to the problem. Then I'll throw them all away and code my own. Possibly it will share a lot with one of the answers, what I would consider a good approach. But a literal copy and paste just doesn't happen. I would consider a copy and paste a recipe for inviting trouble, because you haven't really reasoned through the problem yourself, and thus don't really understand the solution intimately.

Programming is a process of mental reasoning around your problem with an eye on the form of reasoning computers use, so you can express that reasoning to the computer in the language you're using. Because computers don't reason like humans 'reason' (ie. humans don't really 'reason'...), knowing how a computer reasons and behaves is alien and takes time to understand and learn and it takes time to become quicker at comprehending this. This is the path of becoming a better programmer. Gaining that experience so the process is less alien and you more easily can fathom how a computer will respond and behave with a certain approach of laying out of the logic you are trying to express.

Copy and paste doesn't help you at all with this. In some cases it may prevent you learning essential lessons and hinder your improvement.

bra-ket• 12 years ago

copy and paste helps to get the job done

jwdunne• 12 years ago

I don't think so. A program is an infinite stream of jobs and is never quite 'done'. The less time you spend on keeping things nice and clean, the more frequent the jobs will be. After all, it still needs to be maintained.

Unless you are using a library, it's gonna be better long-term going for complete understanding. Even then, it's usually a great idea to understand what a lib does under the hood.

chrismorgan• 12 years ago

I read that as tongue-in-cheek.

soup102• 12 years ago

I copy and paste code all the time. I'm in the business of getting shit done, not learning everything ever, I don't need to learn the ins and outs of some obscure algorithm I'm only going to use once. I also don't need to memorize Apis and boilerplate for technologies I rarely use. Of course once i'm settled into a domain I don't need google anymore. But it's invaluable for quickly diving into new stuff.

Swizec5• 12 years ago

Please never stop doing this. I get paid $$$++ to swoop in after people like you are done and whole teams grind to a halt productivity-wise because the codebase is so bad.

You are doing god's work, son. Thank you.

baddox• 12 years ago

This is not 'coding' (maybe it is, and we should be doing less of it, and more programming). This is gluing together pre-coded snippets and trying to make it work. Continuing to do this is an impediment to getting better. Thinking that somehow this is what 'coding' is, is missing the point.

That's not fair at all. Off the top of my head, three topics I have searched StackOverflow for a lot are Android development, MongoDB, and MySQL. Each time, I would consider the task I was doing to be programming, despite the fact that I was not building a mobile phone operating system or database myself from scratch.

nhebb• 12 years ago

Copy and paste doesn't help you at all with this.

Generally I agree with this, but there is a way to use copy-pasta as a learning tool. If I find a code sample that does what I want but don't understand it, here is what I do:

1. Add a comment with a link to the source for reference.

2. Rename the variables.

3. Comment the parts that I understand.

4. Flag the parts I don't understand with a simple // ? comment.

5. Research the parts of #4 until I understand them, and then update each comment accordingly.

#2 is incredibly important to me. I've been doing some walk-through tutorials lately (e.g., http://learn.knockoutjs.com), and if I use the same variable names as the tutorials suggest, then I'm just transcribing. The code doesn't stick in my head, and I'm not really learning as much. But once I start changing the variable names, then it sticks.

#3 might seem like a waste of time, but I've found with conceptually difficult code, having the #3 comments helps keep me grounded if my brain gets too muddled.

userbinator2• 12 years ago

There should be one more step:

6. Make changes to it so that it does the same thing, but in a better way -- faster, smaller/more concise, etc.

I think that being able to do this (correctly) is to truly understand, since then you are "thinking beyond the code" and can see the problem that it solves, not just an implementation that solves it.

cliveowen• 12 years ago

I completely agree with you and frankly I'm shocked to see most of the responses here purporting copy-pasting someone else's code to be a legitimate practice. I also imagine that most if not all of these people are into web developed where there's a long history of copy-pasting snippets of code and no one knows what he's really doing. I've seen many people write a jQuery script for their website and calling themselves developers. You're not a developer, you're mashing together tools you don't really know how to use in the hope that everything works out. On the browser you're working with a single thread, in the real world you're always dealing with multi-process/multi-thread programs that inevitably lead to race conditions and deadlock. I doubt anyone involved in systems programming thinks is normal to copy and paste code to "get things done", it's just not gonna work.

ktran032• 12 years ago

Same. I'm actually a little shocked HNers think regularly coping and pasting code snippets off the web is ok. That's, kind of crazy.

This is bad especially for young developers (such as myself). Not to mention jeopardizing the security and integrity of your software project.

I hear 'don't reinvent the wheel' often written in blogs etc. That is not good. The lazy developer would read that and go, 'oh, I dont need to know how these things work, it's already been done for me. I'll just slap A to B, no need to reinvent anything'

Imo how it should read instead is, 'keep reinventing the dam wheel till you understand how it was made, only then you're free from reinventing it'.

jesusmichael3• 12 years ago

wow... You must be from the school of re-inventing the wheel... most things that need to be coded have been done before by someone else and quite well... No one chops down their own tress when they want to build a deck. They take lumber that someone else preformed and make it fit their project. If you are writing all your own code every time on every project... You must get nothing done...

nailer• 12 years ago

Libraries yes, copypasta no. They're maintained, have tests, and a download/follower count.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

I will disagree with your copy and paste assessment. While it will hinder a junior programmer its a godsend to the senior developer. Someone who can quickly recognize what the code is doing and integrate it into the final solution.

There are more than enough APIs just on the platform I work with daily that I can imagine how much fun it must be sorting through all those available to Windows developers must not be a joy. Well Google lets me search quickly for established solutions and combined with my knowledge I can quickly identify which if any will do what I want to do and adapt if not drop into my coding style.

TL;DR

Copy/Paste might not be good for new programmers, but time savings for experienced programmers warrants its use

Kiro• 12 years ago

Then I'll throw them all away and code my own. Possibly it will share a lot with one of the answers, what I would consider a good approach

So basically you're in the business of reinventing the wheel all the time. I feel sorry for your employer.

userbinator2• 12 years ago

It could be said that he is reinventing the wheel and trying to make it rounder, which is definitely a good thing.

delian663• 12 years ago

Although rarely, it is worth it sometimes to reinvent the wheel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Tq3Gsj6lY :-)

lazyjones2• 12 years ago

Copy and paste doesn't help you at all with this. In some cases it may prevent you learning essential lessons and hinder your improvement.

It annoys the heck out of me too when people apply for a programming job and cannot implement even trivial CS methods (like integer => string conversion with base N), then point out that they would just Google for a solution if they needed something like this.

But to be honest, a lot of programming wisdom is buried somewhere on the web as well as inside libraries that do not warrant reimplementation. Much of this googling and copy-pasting simply represents the fact that our traditional programming library approach isn't sufficient anymore for distributing correct implementations of particular functionality - probably too much overhead. SO is much like a large library with mediocre code, imprecise interface specification and without working imports, but it also contains many solutions to trivial problems that competent engineers should be able to implement straighforwardly...

mattmanser3• 12 years ago

I have been programming professionally for 10 years, 5 years more as a hobby. I have been paid 100s of thousands of dollars, my code is used daily by 10s of thousands of people, I have built large, complex systems from scratch, worked in teams and by myself. The things I make do what they're supposed to, they don't break often[1], tend to be fast and usually my client is a happy bunny.

I can fix anyone's code, even when I've never used the language before [2] and it was written by an outsourced programmer who quite obviously only read "how to write SatanScript in 28 days" and then was locked in a room for 2 years until his program kinda worked if you held it upside down while reciting the words to Annie.

I am confident I am a good coder at this point in my career, and much better than many of the programmers I have met. There are a handful I have met that I know are better than me.

I would only have a vague idea of how to do a integer => string conversion with base N without googling it. So am I shit? Am I suddenly a useless programmer because lazyjones only likes people who studied CS? Even though I can understand that code in a glance and rewrite it, often better or clearer than the SO example?

You have picked an arbitrary, and extremely rare in the programming world, standard. No-one needs to write their own string handling routines any more.

Programming is hard and there are many different flavours.

And yours is an old fashioned favour from the early 00s. Stop judging people by it.

[1] Apart from my very bad habit of making a minor last minute tweak or bug fix, not testing it, and introducing an easily fixed bug

[2] They're all pretty much the same after you've used 3 or 4.

ronaldx2• 12 years ago

Absolutely disagree.

I personally learned (as I think many people did) by copying code out of books. Whenever something went wrong, I had to figure out whether it was my typo or the book's typo or my conceptual error or the book's conceptual error. That process helped me to learn a lot, and quickly. If everything went perfect, I got to play some creative game which I loved and gave me a sense of acheivement that helped me to progress.

I no longer do this, because it's not relevant to me at this stage of my learning, but I view that as an important part of my early learning process. If you reflect on your own early learning process, I would be extremely surprised if you didn't copy and paste code. Frankly, you are surely still dependent on other people's code now, you just might call it a 'library' instead.

I agree if you're saying professional developers should avoid copy-paste (there are also legal consequences), but new learners can make great progress by using copy-paste. I would say it's an essential part of studying what other people have done.

FreeFull• 12 years ago

Do note that there can be a difference between copying code from a book (where you have to read each bit of the code and write it down) and simply hitting ctrl-c ctrl-v, in terms of what you learn.

redshirtrob• 12 years ago

I think there's a large difference between copy-paste and what you're describing (which I'll dub 'manual transcription'). I have no formal training in learning or cognition, but I do have quite a bit of personal, anecdotal evidence to suggest that manual transcription is far more useful, from a pedagogical standpoint, than straight copy-paste.

Rather than take a boring example from my programming career I'd rather draw from my brief mathematical studies in college. In undergrad I was taking a course on Real Analysis. The course redefined, much more rigorously, certain concepts that I had understood at a much higher level--think the limit, derivatives and the Riemann Integral. Suffice it to say that these new concepts challenged my understanding of introductory Calculus, and when I was tasked with writing proofs based on the underlying concepts (e.g. neighborhoods), I struggled.

In what can only be described as frustration I decided I was going to start copying the proofs over and over. I repeatedly transcribed half a doze proofs for a few days straight (I did each one a few times each night). A strange thing happened. I began to understand the proofs. By that I mean I started to understand the intuition required to make the transition between each step of the proofs. At that point I found the material much more accessible. Reading the book was easier, the lectures made more sense, I could do homework, and consequently I could complete the exams.

I like this example because there is no copy-paste alternative. I had to engage with the material, but I chose to engage at a very mechanical level. Still, there was something about the process of reading and writing that aided in understanding the material.

I don't believe you can get that with copy-paste unless you find some other way to engage with the code.

increment_i• 12 years ago

I can appreciate your opinion on this but it strikes me as a bit of a 'high horse' statement to declare that copy and paste is the wrong way to learn or advance the process of mental reasoning. At some level, we're all copying someone who came before us, unless you're working at the absolute bleeding edge.

Everybody has their own style of learning, and not everyone is at a point in their journey where poring over API docs or dropping down into a lower level makes sense for them.

Confusion• 12 years ago

Agreed, but doesn't that mean the main premise is almost correct? It indeed seems like the skill of 'programming' depends on the development of a knack for Googling for the right terms.

I think it is actually the other way around: once you develop the skill of 'programming', you will know what to search for when you have a problem and you will understand enough of the puzzle to construct the last piece from the various results to your search query. If you don't know how to search for an answer to your problem, you do not sufficiently understand your problem.

riveralabs• 12 years ago

Copy/Paste is OK as long as you understand the code. If the code is elegant and you know what's happening there's no need to change it.

I would argue that the problem is not the copy/pasting but where to paste the code. As an iOS developer I download a lot of code samples from the Apple Development Website. In many cases on these samples the developers put a lot of code in Controllers to show how things are done.

Beginner developers will usually copy/paste the code as is in the controller and believe what it does by faith.

An experience developer should understand that the code was put in the controller for educational purposes and place the code where it belongs. A Model, Singleton, or leave it in the controller if it makes sense.

orkoden• 12 years ago

I have seen many sample projects included in full in final products. "It's from Apple, it must be good!"

ankurdhama• 12 years ago

Learning to Code is really really easy. Learning to create something useful by code is the hard one.

drakaal2• 12 years ago

Coding is easy. The problem is too many "teachers" expect you to have a larger vocabulary than you need.

I taught 3rd graders to code. I also taught 1st graders, but the 3rd graders it really clicked. They would come up with solutions to things I would not have thought were possible given the limited language we were working in.

We started in "Project Europa" it is object oriented, module based, and the vocabulary is very limited. But students built all sorts of virtual robots to do all sorts of interesting things.

When I learned to code I learned in RPG, and that doesn't stand for Role Playing Game. Then I moved on to Basic. Turbo Basic, and later QBasic. I wrote a 3D boxing game in QBasic. Yes. 3D graphics from QBasic.

To this day my vocabulary in any programming language is pretty limited. Those around me get upset because I'll use a While loop and increment a counter rather than a For loop and the Index of the thing I am looping through. It is not that I don't want to use the wider vocabulary, or that I have anything against Lambda's. I don't dislike Tuples. I have nothing against using a Class. But I don't usually need more than my 12 word vocabulary to build things. If I do, that is a performance optimization. What? Itertools and product will do the same thing I did with nested For Loops? So? I didn't know there was an itertools. I didn't know there was a product.

Someone said you need to develop a knack for asking the right question of google... Nah, sure StackOverflow has 90% of the answers you'd ever need to know, and they have a clever code snippet that I will admit comes in handy, but if you have to break thought to Google, you aren't breathing the code. It is like trying to learn Spanish by carrying the pocket guide with you rather than making do with the 12 words you know until you can learn 6 more, and then 12 more then 24 more words.

Take the training wheels off and suck it up. Machines are big and fast, large vocabularies are for people who want to speak concisely. A 3rd grader may not use the best choice of words, but he can still explain to you how to make a peanut butter sandwich, or build something in mine craft.

So don't let anyone tell you Programming is hard. Programming is easy. But there are a lot of ass hats who care if you should have built a function rather than copy and pasting the same code with minor variations 20 times. Or will say "you could have done that in one line with a lamba and a reciprocal function"

"Yeah, and Einstein had someone else do most of the math for his proofs because he kind of sucked at calculus. I'll get to optimizations after I have something that runs."

fivedogit• 12 years ago

You might as well say "basketball is easy". Sure, dribbling a ball can be taught instantly, but your 3 pt percentage or rebounding skill can continually improve over the course of a career.

Just because you taught some 3rd graders a for loop doesn't make them coders and it certainly doesn't make them engineers.

The programming is easy myth is doubly bad: it sets a false expectation for the aspirants and belittles actual engineers' lifetimes of study.

drakaal2• 12 years ago

Mastering anything is hard. But kids play basketball.

I can cook, but I'm not a master chef. That doesn't mean I don't do it. Nor does it mean "cooking is hard".

Riding a bicycle is a lot harder than basketball.

eropple2• 12 years ago

But there are a lot of ass hats who care if you should have built a function rather than copy and pasting the same code with minor variations 20 times.

That larger vocabulary you sneer at is much of what allows developers to be multiplicatively productive, allows them to do much more work and do it in a faster and less error-prone way.

Or, put another way: are they having to maintain your code when you get tired of it and move on or are they having to deal with second-order effects from your code being more brittle, less flexible, and slower to work on? 'Cause if so, they're not the asshat.

R_Edward2• 12 years ago

I looked at the nightly order-processing workflow for the regional retailer I worked for one time. I was gobsmacked to find that one section of it consisted of launching the same suite of 5-6 programs one time for each of our 25 locations. And "launching" meant setting a handful of run-time variables, executing the object, waiting for it to finish running, and examining the result.

It was fairly easy to see why this happened. That workflow was the heart and soul of the company's revenue processing, and no one wanted to touch it any more than absolutely necessary, to avoid breaking anything. So when they expanded from one warehouse to two, it made more sense to simply re-iterate the existing code with the new location id. When they added another location, re-iterate it again, and so forth.

I created a Launch subroutine, then replaced all those hundreds of lines of code with a for loop that simply called the Launch subroutine for each object needed. Then I went through the rest of the workflow and swapped in Launch calls where appropriate. Overnight, that workflow became much shorter, more readable, and most importantly, significantly more maintainable. Previously, if you wanted to change what programs were run per branch, you had to insert the launching logic in twenty-five separate spots. Now? Once.

That, my friends, is why we build functions, rather than copypasta-ing the same code over and over.

spain• 12 years ago

I highly disagree. The author says one of the main reasons coding isn't easy is because setting up the environment is so difficult. The problem is that if you try and learn "iOS" using XCode then of course the environment has a lot more weight and cause more issues that you really don't need to deal with as a beginner. A better option would be to fire up a simple Scheme or Ruby interpreter in a terminal and watch them go (after giving them a copy of your favorite programming book). Heck, with things like CodeAcademy you can just visit a website and eliminate the environment issue completely.

I'd say the problem with programming isn't that it's difficult, but that it's intimidating. Writing a bunch of arcane symbols and words in a text file scares people off, while really it's just everyday logic people use in a different form (at least, the very basics are). I think that's also why programmers keep telling people it's so easy, so that they get over that irrational fear.

Bizknacker• 12 years ago

Though I'm a novice C++ programmer (working with templates at the moment), the only time I'd ever felt lost and stupid, which was just recently, was when it came time to write the end-of-chapter program in the book I'm reading.

Oddly enough, the program wasn't difficult to understand. I've even written it and got it to run before! I think what happened this time around, is I had read the chapter again, started writing more notes and had a better grasp on the material than before, that when it came time to bring all the concepts together, the example program didn't include them! For the first time in years, I actually felt stupid, borderline retarded (in the literal sense).

The example involved an abstract base class, Dragon, with 3 derived classes. The idea was to have a player fight a randomly selected dragon via Base class array and Base class pointer. At this point in the book, aggregation was discussed and shown in an earlier example, but wasn't implemented in the example. Mind you, no player class was created! So basically, arguments were passed to xDragon's defend and attack member functions via variables within the main function.

So I'd decided to create a Player class instead, and have the Player And Dragon objects interact with each other in the main function. Problem was, I hadn't learned enough to know how to do that, to which I didn't realize until error after error and trying desperately to get it running. I'd refrained from using Google and Stack Overflow for the most part, save for a few compiler errors I'd never received.

In the end, I'd decided to create a Game class that layered a Player and Dragon object. I had a feeling I should have written it that way from the start, but felt uncertain. The last errors that I was stuck on for a few days, I'd solved by way of "I wonder if this will help" lol.

Up until then, I wasn't aware that if you don't have a separate implementation file for a class, and should you decide to layer an object from that class, the class must be defined within the class declaration. Having defined member functions outside of the declaration, although within the header file, gave me: include\BlackDragon.h|22|multiple definition of `BlackDragon::calcDamage(short)', first defined here.

I will admit, it did put a damper on me. I felt like I was on a roll up until that. Perhaps I'll take a week or two break from programming get the feeling back again.

deadghost• 12 years ago

When I see "programming is easy" I think "dirty, filthy lies!" When people say everyone should know how to program I think "why?" There's some weird nerd myopia going on with the programming literacy movement.

Programming takes an odd kind of thinking and is about as easy as anything else that takes a large amount of time and effort (read not easy).

armada651• 12 years ago

The kind of brain necessary for programming is the one that sees something it doesn't understand and then does everything it can to learn what it didn't understand.

The real reward in programming is clearly seeing how much your understanding has grown. But at the same time you're humbled by how much you have yet to learn.

erikb• 12 years ago

Although the basic assumption by the author seems to be correct, the author himself is not very far in his journey to become a programming master. I now study and work in programming for about 7 years. About 3 years into programming I thought the same way as the author: Tutorials and copy&paste.

If you reach a certain level tutorials become a waste of time, because you don't need structural help any more. You also understand that you shouldn't google how to implement a specific solution in the language of choice but which solution in that language solves the given problem. You also don't copy&paste because just solving a single problem is not the question any more. You can already solve most problems. It's more that the desire to improve leads to learning new principles, which means hand-copying small code examples (sometimes from actual programs not from SO questions) and playing with them until you get a feel for it and then start to use it in your daily programming tasks.

zhaphod• 12 years ago

There is an enormous difference between writing in English and writing like Shakespeare, Hitchens, Rushdie, or Stephen King. When it comes to coding most people confuse learning syntax with writing great software.

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste.

And this is how the security industry makes its living.

yuribit• 12 years ago

"The anxiety of feeling lost and stupid is not something you learn to conquer, but something you learn to live with"

That's exactly my daily felling, but I'm just a junior soft eng

analog31• 12 years ago

>> One of the most dangerous things I’ve seen happen to people who are just starting to code is being told that it’s easy.

I've encouraged my kids to learn programming. The one thing I haven't done is tell them it's easy. Anyway, they've seen me in bug hell, so they're under no illusions. But they're no strangers to learning hard things.

>> And they don’t let you in on a big secret: that there is no mastery, there is no final level. The anxiety of feeling lost and stupid is not something you learn to conquer, but something you learn to live with.

Yes! Bring it on! Bright kids spend their entire school day at the final level -- 99th percentile on every possible measure. Those kids would benefit from an extracurricular activity with no final level (traditionally, "classical" music) that they can pursue at their own pace.

>> They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste.

In my view, that's a general skill in its own right, worthy of learning. I fixed my refrigerator and clothes dryer that way. I rarely tackle any technical task without first seeing if somebody has blogged a tutorial. And I grew up fixing things before the Internet age. But I'd start kids on coding without the Google Everything approach.

>> [the anxiety / boredom graph]

I enjoyed that. It does seem to ring true.

snambi• 12 years ago

A lot of coding today is "integration". This is where the code snippets and tutorials come into play. Imho, coding is probably less than 20% of development.

Uncompetative• 12 years ago

Processing.js

http://sketchpad.cc/h3QngEM9Vu

the_duck• 12 years ago

"The anxiety of feeling lost and stupid is not something you learn to conquer, but something you learn to live with."

I started practicing mindfulness meditation a few years ago. Mindfulness trains you to experience your emotions without judging them; in other words, it helps you to "live with" feelings like frustration and anxiety without getting overwhelmed by them. It's been an invaluable addition to my programming toolkit.

pekk• 12 years ago

It is easy. It just takes years and years to become any good.

collyw4• 12 years ago

Depends on what you want to do.

I see lots of bioinformaticians writing simple scripts usually just counting stuff up, and doing some stats. It needs to run once, on one machine and often only on one dataset.

That type of programming is easy.

I am working for a sequencing centre, doing the database to run the place. I inherited a self taught bioinformaticians code after she had left. Second worst code I have ever seen (the worst was also a self taught bioinformatician, who didn't even indent stuff). The code was so bad, I had to refactor it just to debug it. The team leader didn't see a problem. It had worked. He didn't see the fact that it would have taken me a day or two to write this from scratch, if I had had an original specification, rather than spending a week to refactor her code until it worked. To this day, I have no idea what parts of the code are doing (I can see it is reading byte 8 of a binary file and doing something. I have no idea what the contents of that file are). At least now I have made the code modular so I can see the output of reading the file into a huge nested dictionary.

Learning to code is easy. Learning to code well is not. Hell we can't even decide what coding "well" means. 100% test coverage? Shit that works? Something that is readable and maintainable? Something that runs faster than all the equivalent software? In the end I think experience will mean a developer can work out which of these is most important. Maybe just getting something that works is what is important, and the example I gave above is perfectly acceptable code.

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

There are so many, many categories of program that its futile to say what it means any more. Expertise in any category doesn't mean squat about anything else.

I've spent a lot of time doing embedded stuff. Totally different world. What matters here is irrelevant elsewhere.

So any time someone says "I can program" you have to ask "Where? With what tools? For what audience?" and so on. Because there are so many niches (and so many being invented every week) its impossible to guess.

ulisesrmzroche• 12 years ago

With strong tests, who cares about copy-paste though?

klunger• 12 years ago

This is a topic I have been thinking about a lot lately, so this article is quite timely.

I was a bad programmer for a long time. For a few years, I was an engineer and basically wrote quick and dirty matlab or python scripts to do physics based modeling and simulations. But, it was never elegant or efficient or anything that I guess you learn about in upper level CS courses.

It didn't have to be. A customer would never see the code, it would never have to perform under critical conditions, it could almost never be reused because each project data set was completely different. The code was just supposed to crunch input and produce meaningful output that could be analyzed.

I got to thinking that I was a pretty good programmer because I could write those scripts.

Then I quit that job and moved to a different country. The only job here that I managed to get was as a software engineer. Here, I learned how very wrong I was. Writing quick and dirty scripts that crunch data is easy. Programming is hard. Really really hard.

gremlinsinc• 12 years ago

My learning has progressed from one area to the next--each person learns differently, and coding can be easy to learn, but like everything else it's difficult to master. I started out on google, pulling snippets/coaxing them to do my will, then I became good at reading docs -- and implementing straight from the docs, for instance in Laravel/Rails apps.

The next big change for me was going beyond the docs to the actual API to do even more customization, and override existing methods. It's a progression from low-level understanding to higher, and whatever gets you there - just don't give up.

Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy

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