We should rethink how we teach people to code
We should rethink how we teach people to code | deadSimpleTech
Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.
I'm glad this exists even though I vehemently disagree.
I would bounce right off a course like this. I fucking hated the webdev course we had. I don't care about websites. Writing a program in C that finds a shortest path in a graph and dumps it to the terminal? Fuck yeah, that's where the dopamine lies.
I agree that teaching people Java or Python as the first language is a bad idea, but for me it's not because they need something simpler that has tangible results - that's the opposite of what my experience tells me! I want them to write code in C that doesn't produce any GUI at all. They need to know how to test code that has no visible buttons to click. How to debug code just using a debugger. Having a tangible result other than just a dump on the terminal is a blight, it makes people lazy. It's very easy to determine that the program works because when I click through buttons in the GUI it does what I expect. When you have a library that doesn't have a GUI but just does things to objects in memory you can't take a shortcut, you need robust testing to convince yourself it does what you want. If you are GUI-centric, they will think that the only code that matters is the one that they can see from the front-end. This is precisely the way people get taught coding now with Python - it doesn't actually matter what is the code, it matters that you get a plot that looks right at the end.
The way to enlightenment lies in having 200 lines of C code that segfaults but only sometimes and having to figure out where the bug is using nothing but a debugger and your brain to analyse the code you wrote. That's how you learn how a computer actually works underneath, and once you get through that then stuff like Java or Python is small potatoes. You'll get the high-level language because you've seen the nightmare underneath the surface.
If the problem is that people don't feel motivated to do that and need a pretty website to feel like coding is fun then idk maybe they should train in something different? If having to debug broken code feels bad then you might want to do something else that's more rewarding. It's fine if there's like 50% fewer programmers but they're more conscious of all the layers between the user and silicon on average and fixing arcane problems scratches their itch.
I don’t care about websites.
Agree, in spades.
Writing a program in C that finds a shortest path in a graph and dumps it to the terminal?
Disagree, although I am not immune.
Graphics. That, for me, is key. Drawing pretty pictures (procedural stuff, like Logo; fonts; and teenage me's particular crack, fractals) was where it was at.
Fuck C and everything it spawned. Give me a Pascal-family thing that doesn't have so much fucking syntactically significant punctuation marks FFS. WORDS, mthrfckr, words not code-breaking types of bloody parentheses.
C is a terrible programming language and I think we must be clear and open about it when teaching it. But it is perfect for what it is: a showcase of how terrible all those low-level details are, how pointers work and why you don't want to rawdog them, etc.
I think there’s room for both approaches simultaneously, especially at universities/colleges where you could offer multiple intro courses.
The point about a static site generator being an ideal intro project is well-taken. I'm working my way through Practical Common Lisp right now, as it's recommended as one of the best CL intro books, and its intro project of an MP3 database is only barely relevant to me because I still have a stash of MP3s I started building up around the time of the book's original publication.
I struggle to imagine what might supplant the HTML generator suggestion in the future. If anything, its desirability is made more apparent by the proliferation of JS monoliths all over the Web. You can show students how quickly it renders compared to a corporate website or heavyweight social-media feed, use that as an introduction to performance considerations and profiling, introduce modularity by bolting on a more dynamic framework piece-by-piece...
I struggle to imagine what might supplant the HTML generator suggestion in the future.
I can't really think of anything to supplant it either. The only addition I can think of would be some complementary arts education, to build students' creative abilities and further highlight the expressive elements of software.
I completely agree with this. Good, lucid, concise commentary on CS/SE education and how to improve it. If I had written this article I’d just be telling people to ban python in coding education.
If I had written this article I’d just be telling people to ban python in coding education.
I'd be happy to hear your reasons why.
Not who you asked, but both python and javascript have code smell as a core language feature and we are stuck with them by accident of history, not because anyone in particular thought it would be such a great idea for them to overshoot their original purpose to such a comical degree.
Also there's a long history of languages meant to be used as an introduction to coding being spun off into ridiculously verbose enterprise equivalents that then everyone had to deal with (see delphi and visual basic) so there's certainly a case for refusing to cede any more ground to dollar store editions of useful stuff under the guise of education.
Short version is that 10-15 years ago, when I was a student, it had the same “vibe” as vibe coding has today, i.e. the promise of easy implementation, but with the final product being sloppy, unreadable and buggy.
The English national curriculum exposes every child to programming of some sort. 10 years ago it was 8yo kids learning Scratch, all of them.
I posted about it at the time: it turns out scratch is probably the answer, scratch is probably still the answer
in high school maths and computers they learn python.
my kid has no wish to become a professional dev, but can wield python as is useful to them.
I hadn't seen this post of yours before. I like it. I like it a lot.
My $SPROG can't really read very well yet but she can open a saved program in Scratch and run it and show off the results, in SUGAR. I was so proud.
IoM cribs from the ENC, here's to them cribbing that bit! See if you can get in there ...
When I was a kid in France it was Basic on TI and Casio graphing calculators, while in principle I agree that not every child will enjoy math, the sieve of Eratosthenes, LCM and GCD are good exercises for a first program. And i think it's easy to grasp that it's a lot less tedious to write a program for it, than to do it by hand.