Slashdot Asks: How Did You Learn How To Code? 515
Last week Apple's CEO argued that computer programming should be a 'second language', and that it should be a required subject for all students starting in 4th grade. But a large number of professional programmers didn't learn how to code in a formal school program, either because they're self-taught or because they learned on the job. There's a lot of abstract discussions about the best ways to teach coding, but if there's any group that's uniquely qualified to answer that question, it's the Slashdot community.
So leave your answers in the comments. How did you learn how to code?
So leave your answers in the comments. How did you learn how to code?
Picked up a book. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank my Uncle for introducing me to DOOM when I was ~10 years old. -- immediate "I want to make that". And so I picked up some books from the library.
by playing the games ... (Score:3)
... in this book: http://www.atariarchives.org/m... [atariarchives.org]
The usual way (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, the usual way for 1980s computer geeks. Self-taught BASIC on an Apple II using a few books on Applesoft and Integer BASIC. Later Pascal also on the Apple II with a few books including Jensen and Wirth's PASCAL User Manual and Report. Learned C (K&R, mind you, none of that prototype crap) on a Mac XL with the old Megamax compiler. Picked up 6502 assembler out of necessity in there, also 68000 and 6809.
Re:The usual way (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, you practically need to be an experienced developer even to get a modern IDE up and running. Eclipse? Xcode? Not for the faint-hearted.
Not sure about hard statistics, but I'd say it's a safe bet most new developers these days need to be shown how to get going. Beyond that, they'll naturally self-teach and bootstrap themselves, or fail out early. Because at the end of the day, no matter how you learn, your practical knowledge (meaning libraries and frameworks and tools, if not entire languages) will be functionally obsolete within two years, formal CS concepts and emacs/vim godliness notwithstanding.
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Yup. I was able to teach my kids how to open and use QuickBASIC when they were little in the 90s. Now I'm not sure what approach I would use to teach a child actual coding (vs. moving stupid blocks around on a screen that PR flaks call "coding").
To answer the OP question (and agree with the GP of this reply), it was absolutely all self-taught, as were the additional languages I've picked up over the last 40 years.
Started with the TRS-80 in Radio Shack. I checked out "Basic BASIC" from the library and took i
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Every copy of Windows has a command prompt which will let you write and execute batch files [wikibooks.org]. Not that I'd recommend that as a way to learn programming, but most of the functionality is st
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Because at the end of the day, no matter how you learn, your practical knowledge (meaning libraries and frameworks and tools, if not entire languages) will be functionally obsolete within two years
Sounds like you're investing in the wrong platforms. Java has been around for 20+ years. The Microsoft .NET platform has been around for 15+ years. Very large parts of both class libraries have been stable for over a decade now. A platform, library or programming language that's so poorly conceived that it's obsolete in two years doesn't sound like it's worth learning. Frankly, that sucks and I don't program on platforms that suck. Java or .NET might not be sexy Silicon Valley flavor of the month hot langua
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BASIC and LOGO (does that count?) during my elementary school days. And then, Pascal, C, C++, and ASM in college. And then a little ASP, ColdFusion, etc. I didn't like coding. I prefer breaking stuff. ;)
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That is, the usual way for 1980s computer geeks. Self-taught BASIC on an Apple II using a few books on Applesoft and Integer BASIC.
I was already working at that point. I'd studied engineering and physics, but having learned to write Basic on a PDP 11/40, then later Fortran on an 11/70 - whenever I'd go out to do an internship, they'd immediately decide I was going to be their programmer. Back then, even electrical engineers didn't do much with those new-tangled computers even smaller companies were starting to buy.
Prior to that... In high school they were just starting to introduce microprocessors. I remember putting together simple as
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That is, the usual way for 1980s computer geeks. Self-taught BASIC on an Apple II using a few books on Applesoft and Integer BASIC. Later Pascal also on the Apple II with a few books including Jensen and Wirth's PASCAL User Manual and Report. Learned C (K&R, mind you, none of that prototype crap) on a Mac XL with the old Megamax compiler. Picked up 6502 assembler out of necessity in there, also 68000 and 6809.
My introduction to BASIC was with a Commodore PET and a book with the code for a number of programs. My first few programs were games like Hangman and Lunar Lander. I learned other computer languages when I took Computer Science, including Assembler, APL, COBOL, C, FORTRAN, and Modula-2. I've since picked up Visual Basic, VBScript, Java, JavaScript, and Perl.
I'm a Network engineer so I rarely do any coding, but every so often I need to spin up a script.
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BASIC on a Vic20 myself. I learned by looking at the stuff that was published in monthly commodore magazines then changing stuff to see what happened, then branching out to writing my own programs. COBOL and FORTRAN I learned at home out of my dad's old university textbooks from the 70's, since the courses he took required both languages. These days? I just learn what I need to learn to keep going, sometimes I'll just look at some new up and coming language and learn it just for something to do.
I'd alwa
2 week FORTRAN short course at JC. Lied about age. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was off and running. Self taught basic, 6502 and Z-80 assembler. Worked two summers to buy my first microcomputer.
Learned a bunch translating various basic dialects. Typing games in from Creative Computing etc.
Backfilled informal programming education with EE and CompE degrees.
I can spot the potential future programmer among 10 year olds playing. The future programmer is working puzzles requiring thought.
Star Trek (Score:4, Informative)
I first saw code on an Apple II - the Star Trek game.
I read an introduction to programming, and proceeded to modify the Star Trek game to not decrement the photon torpedo count whenever I fired one - ditto energy levels for shields and phasers. After a while I wrote a bouncing ball game, similar to pong.
Some time after I left school I found myself as the sysop for an IBM System/36, and I would play around with the application software source code to see how it worked - not the actual source code, of course - I made a copy to play with. The IBM programmer's and reference manuals are quite comprehensive and from there I was able to take on the source code maintenance and development roles. It was mostly RPGII, with a little bit of BASIC. Then we moved to an AS400, RPGIII, RPG400, and SQL.
Coding, or programming? (Score:5, Insightful)
I learned to code first in classes in high school (BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal) and then by reading the relevant books or documentation (C, C++, Lisp, Icon, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Javascript et. al.).
The more interesting question is where developers first learned to program (a completely different skill from coding). IMO we don't need to teach children to code, we need to teach them to program. Which means first teaching them to approach problems logically and analytically, which is going to cause the loss of about 75% (my guesstimate) of the educational establishment when they can't deal with students who know how to analyze material, do independent research and call teachers on incorrect classroom material.
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I still think they are the same... (Score:2)
Even just learning to code, if you write anything of any complexity you learn lessons of programming as you need to work with files, structure the program you are writing, and deal with performance... it's true you are not learning what others knew before you, but the coding you do before you really study "programming' reenforces the lessons on programming. By the time I picked up the design patterns book in school, I already knew quite a lot of the patterns named from my own coding.
hungry (Score:4, Informative)
In the 1990's if you were a fresh grad with 80K in student and credit card debt, USD200 to your name and not a soul on earth to help you, coding for 30K a year was a way to put food into your stomach. The offer looked even better with no gas money to get to the next interview. Doesn't matter if you've never written any code. Any fool with a solid IQ and a fire under his ass should be able to get good at coding pretty quick ( finding out about Scott Meyers, Erich Gamma, Fowler, Aho, et. al. early on helped. Need to buy all those guys a beer one day. They saved my ass. )
How I learn't to code: (Score:4, Informative)
Books!
First: The Apple ][ Basic Manual.
Second: Rodney Zaks, Programming the 6502
Third: Jeffrey Stanton, Apple Graphics and Arcade Game Design
38 years later my bookshelves are heaving.
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My first was David A Lien, Learning BASIC for Tandy Computers
It has a series of cartoon illustrations in which a dude argues with his witty computer, which appealed to me as a youth.
Plus, copying programs out of magazines like BYTE and the like. I think I really learned how to program by debugging my transcription errors from magazines, then by figuring out how to alter the functionality of the programs that I'd entered.
Old Guy (Score:2)
I went to a summer program in 1966 (!) where I learned Fortran II and then IBM 1620 assembler. I think the computer had 2k of core memory or something. Those IBM 026 keypunch machines were really something.
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Apple IIe + VIC 20 (Score:3)
Old-Fashioned Way (Score:2)
I learned it by taking a class. Machine, Assembly, high-level. The arguments were all about which language to learn. Punched cards - the best way to enter code - no upper/lower case, so shift keys put numbers and special symbols onto regular letters. Much faster than stupid keyboards of today.
Started with the C64, of course (Score:2)
Curiosity (Score:2)
On an ALWAC IIIE (Score:5, Interesting)
Computer class in school, spring of 1959. Coded in Hex, 512 bytes of memory (recirculating drum), 32K mass storage that was so big one didn't know what to do with it. Solved differential equations, linear systems with rational coefficients, and computed root locus diagrams. When somebody came along to add an assembler I didn't see the point, as it wouldn't even let you use instructions as data, and made it more difficult to plan jumps to account for the rotation of the drum. If you used floating point you lost 128 bytes of the memory. It was a very different world.
Re:On an ALWAC IIIE (Score:5, Informative)
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You win.
Computer class in school, summer '74. Vintage 1950 North American Recomp III (owned by the teacher).
Coded in octal, 4K 40 bit words of memory, divided into 8K 20-bit half words.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Introduction to computing CS 201 (Score:2)
Electives (Score:2)
After that I just picked up new languages as needed for my work including FORTRAN, Pascal, PERL, C, and far too much JCL just to get things to work on Big Iron. Still Going with a bit of Python and of course the newer web things that I don't think of as a general lan
Programming, not coding (Score:5, Interesting)
i learnt to program at school from a Ph.D computer scientist. We never even had computers in the class. We learnt to break the problem down into sections using flowcharts or pseudo-code and then we would translate that program into whatever coding language we were using. I still do this usually in my notebook where I figure out all the things I need to do and then write the skeleton of the code using a series of comments for what each section of my program and then I fill in the code for each section. It is a combination of top down and bottom up programming, writing routines that can be independently tested and validated.
By Example (Score:3, Interesting)
The TRS-80 booted to a basic prompt if there was no cartridge inserted. My dad got a book with a few hundred programs printed out, and one of use entered them in by hand and ran them. Then I would make changes to the code to make it do other things as well. I learn mostly by trial and error. When we got an Apple ][ clone I got a copy of "1001 things to do with your Apple II" and I was off to the races.
I finally took some formal classes in college, but spent most of my time lamenting the need to listen to things I had already learned.
The thing is, I had this opportunity because my parents had the resources to get the computers, and I was encouraged by teachers and friend to continue to learn. It is pretty clear that the best programmers all started by forth grade, not high school or college. If only rich white kids can start that early and boy are more likely then girls to take up computers as a hobby the current demographic deficiencies in the industry are likely to continue.
Commodore VIC-20 (Score:4, Interesting)
I was interested in computers since I was around 7. My first computer was a V-Tech "Learning Computer" which barely did anything, but I played with it all the time. My dad bought a used VIC-20 from a friend, and I sat with this book and tape until I could program Basic:
https://archive.org/details/VI... [archive.org]
Learned Python by doing (Score:3)
I started on page one of the O'Reilly book Learning Python and, get this, wrote a flash card program that quizzed me on Python. The further along I got in the book, the better the program got. Had to start over three or four times to clean up the spaghetti but by the time it was all over I had a pretty good handle on what I was doing.
Programming (Score:3)
College Sorta Kinda (Score:3)
In college they didn't teach any courses in the hip new language that I wanted to learn, so I took a course in Pascal and taught myself "C" in parallel with that.
I liked C a lot better.
I *also* learned an immense amount during the same time period by picking apart an open source game, modifying it, expanding it, learning everything about how it worked. I'd say the majority of what I ended up actually learning was self-taught.
However. . . Looking back, I'd already been dabbling with trying to learn BASIC and other such stuff for a few years by that time, and my progress had been VERY SLOW. I'm sure my self-teaching/dabbling progress would have been way faster if I'd had access to the amazing online resources that now exist.
pretty standard (Score:5, Funny)
I was on a school field trip, wandered away from the group and was bitten by a radioactive programmer. Pretty standard stuff.
Hypercard (Score:2)
Learned to use Hypercard on my Mac.
Then messed around with changing colors on the Commodore 64 at elementary .
- A TI-83 & TI-89 at high school.
- Matlab class in college.
- PHP in my free time in college.
- Then Java, C, C++ in college.
- Then 'self taught' Python from code academy (just to learn the syntax).
1st programming. self taught basic in 1976 (Score:4, Interesting)
I taught myself basic.
Pascal was the language taught in college.
Since then I've taught myself C, C++, Java, Python, Javascript,
PDP-11/05 (Score:2)
paper tape (Score:3)
My Brother Taught Me TI 99/4A BASIC (Score:2)
In ~2nd grade my brother exposed me to programming with doing simple character animations in TI 99/4A BASIC.
I actually just two weeks ago recreated that experience for the first time in 21 years and posted it to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
AOL progs (Score:2)
Way back (Score:3)
When the world was young and the dead sea was only sick, it was easy to Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Break your way out of games that were written in BASIC/BASICA and just do a LIST of the game's code since games usually shipped in code not in binaries. It was a heck of a learning experience - all those mysterious peeks and pokes made you want to learn more.
After that it's just a case of getting your hands on a copy of MASM, Turbo C or Turbo Pascal and away you go...
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I don't code (Score:4, Informative)
I hate programming/coding. Trying to think how to write a program makes me feel disoriented and nauseous.
In the various 'autism' tests I've done I've come out as massively 'heteronormative', this may be connected.
And I certainly wouldn't want to force my kid to learn to code, especially not as young as 4th grade. I'd find that almost as disturbing as forcing him to do religious studies or gender studies.
Don't make coding compulsory, it suits a particular kind of mind. First let the mind develop, find what it likes to think about, then get the kid to learn into those areas.
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So how is programming different from any other subject a child learns at school?
Or do you believe that a child should have had prior experience with writing or math or sports before they choose to have it taught to them at school?
Electronics (Score:2)
However I wasn't supported by my school and even my parents didn't look on it as anything more than a hobby rather than serious career choice that required dedication and focus. I swept floors and
School + my own shtuff (Score:2)
I got my degree and went to work, hated the work I was doing and quit the job and spent a year part time tutoring math barely affording rent and every morning I'd spend the day working on software. I worked through several books on game development, c++ development and general development practices. I also did some cs work in computer graphics and some math work in cs at school but those did not help me learn how to write truly functional software.
me me me (Score:2)
I'm semi-self taught. I had an Atari computer as a kid and enjoyed fritting about in BASIC. In high school I took a programming course that taught Pascal. Once I became an office drone I experimented with Visual Basic to do Excel macros, then I moved to PHP to work on my website, then Javascript to automate tasks in Photoshop, now I work in Python quite a bit. I'm not a developer, though, I'm somewhat of a generalist scripter (variables, arrays, if/thens, while loops, etc, are practically universal) who
PL/1 (Score:2)
Using punch cards on CUNY's 370. Max was about 3 runs/listings per day.
Its all down to the language (Score:2)
Loved playing around with GW-BASIC in early 90s in an early 286 or so.
Then enjoyed coding in C/C++ in university years.
Recently re-discovering my passion to program with JavaScript.
I've tried many other ugly languages, like Java, Ruby, Python, and some proprietary languages came with corporate software. Naturally, they make you start hating programming in general. YMMV on this.
"It's called a process, not an 'amateur-cess'". (Score:2)
In most cases, the process of learning to code goes like this:
1. I got a computer! Cool! Look, I just type in this "program" I got from { a magazine | my brother | the internet | Jim the IT guy } and I can make a blue square dance!
2. Great, now I wonder what else I can make dance. Oh, and what else I can make a blue square do? And what about other colors and shapes?
3. Okay, over a two-month period I wrote this thirty-page program that does something I like. I'm going to show it to { the computer club |
BASIC on HP time sharing system (Score:2)
There was "offline help" where you pressed a button with a keyword on an information kiosk and it automatically flipped a book inside to the corresponding page. Can't go wrong with BASIC. Not that it teaches programming practices you would want to use long term, but it reflects the essence of how computers work internally without being as intimidating as assembly.
Apple IIe (Score:2)
And another who taught myself to write assembler on the Apple IIe.
Learnt to love the Orcam Macro Assembler.
Entirely self-taught (Score:2)
This was in high school.
Once I got college I taught myself FORTRAN, PDP-10 assembly, Pascal, Simula, LISP, and so on.
I only ever took one CS class where I learned Algol 60 of all things. Except I attended two lectures at most, so I don't think it real
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Except I attended two lectures at most
Haahhhhahaahah. That's almost my one experience in programming in my C class. The professor was treating it as a weed out class and covered the whole language in the first four lectures (variables, control structures, libraries, libraries and pointers). Out of 400 people in the class, only about 8 of us had any clue what as going on and the prof was replaced by someone who spent the rest of the semester teaching what he had already taught. I assume because I stopped going.
Programming History. (Score:2)
1980ish Apple II Basic -> TI/994A Basic + c64 BASIC -> COBOL/RPG -> 8088 Assembler - Turbo Pascal -> C + *(sh, lisp, (etc.)) -> Visual Basic :( -> Perl -> PHP :( -> Perl?
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Wow, I forgot FORTRAN. How could I have forgotten FORTRAN :/
I learned to hate Pascal in University (Score:2)
I learned to hate Pascal at university
I learned C from the K&R book at home - and loved every bit of it.
Since I started working in IT I've learned whatever language I have needed.
Programming requires a level of aptitude, combined with interest and self motivation. Maybe when Teachers work out how to solve that problem they can move on to teaching computer programming.
I believe however that the increased interest in education (read the greed of educa
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most likely demotivate students
I have great confidence that this is exactly what will happen. On the flip side, computers are so ubiquitous and free for all practical purposes today that anyone with motivation will know far more than the teacher years before they enter the class. When my high school got its first computer, a few students and I would spend all of our time in the computer lab and we taught the teacher what to teach in his class (I don't think we were actually in the class). To be fair he had a math degree but had never see
IBM PC BASIC manual - self taught (Score:2)
In 1983, my high school offered a "data processing" class through the local technical school. It was basically data entry on a "mini" computer. I finished the class in about 6 weeks, and had nothing to do for the rest of the semester. About that time, the school got their first shipment of the original IBM PC, the ones that booted into ROM BASIC if you didn't insert a floppy disk. The teacher let me take the manuals home to study, and I spent the rest of that semester teaching myself how to write code.
I
I started on a TRS-80 model III (cassettes) (Score:2)
I self taught myself Basic, and was well into Assembly Language when I bought an Amiga that had no working programing language available.
So while owning the best computer ever made, it cost me programing wise.
BASIC (Score:2)
I remember my brothers and I got a magazine called "3-2-1 contact" that had some source code to some BASIC games. These were short programs that we could type into a GWBASIC interpreter and play. The syntax was easy enough to follow, even without knowing BASIC. At first we just typed the programs directly into GWBASIC, but then I started playing around and wrote my own crappy games.
Later, got a new computer with MS DOS 5 (I think) which came with qbasic, and qbasic games "nibbles" and "gorillas". qbasic was
QBASIC (Score:2)
My sister came back from the states with an IBM PS/2 in 1992, which was my first ever contact with a PC (or home computer in general - except a couple of Captain Blood sessions with a friend's Amiga). I quickly discovered it can play games and that you had to learn a bit of DOS to get many of them to play and while looking into this DOS thing I came across QBASIC. It had a function reference so I taught myself, my first notable programs being a game (a bit like gorilla, but with tanks viewed overhead) and a
First a VIC-20 then three C-64s (Score:2)
I conned my parents into buying me a VIC-20 with 3.5 KB of RAM, then I saw the wonders of the VIC-20 Super Expander which pushed my mighty computer to 8K of memory and gave me some astonishing graphics which include lines, circles, points and fill. Later I got a C64 and the world was my clam, I got the C-64 Super Expander and was horrified to see that I went from 38K to 30K but the High Res graphics were amazing; imagine 320x200 pixels, amazing.
I stuck with my C-64s until college at which point I got an Am
Standing at kiosks in malls and department stores (Score:2)
The computer fad started in the early 80's, so vic 20, atari and ti-94s were sold at practically any place that sold anything (including the produce depart
Univeristy (Score:2)
Texas Instruments (Score:2)
TI-BASIC on a TI 99/4A was my first foray into learning how to draw an image on a screen, at age 6.
taught myself (Score:2)
I learned my first programming language - Apple BASIC - from computer magazines back in the early 80s, then had it reinforced in 'Computer Math' classes in high school, and learned a few more languages in college (Fortran 77 and Turbo Pascal in classes, and REXX on my own). Then took C in a college course in the mid-90s, plus learned all the web stuff on my own starting in '94. Everything I use professionally, I learned on my own, other than the logic course I took first semester of college (which should be
Super Early, like 4 or 5 (Score:2)
Worked my way up from the bottom... (Score:2)
Machine code on a PDP-8 at Tech school
then
ASM
then
MACRO
then
FOCAL, Fortran, and Basic along with MACRO-11 (& TECO) and an understanding of the 11's microcode.
then
C
that was magic
Learned to code by reading code (Score:2)
You should ask how should we learn? (Score:2)
Since almost no school teaches 4th graders programming obviously this isn't going to be a common answer.
We should ask hows do we increase programming literacy.
In the age of IoT and everything having a computer in it, basic programming literacy for the masses is important.
I have taught first graders to program so 4th graders which don't have a typing obstacle are almost all capeable of learning. It seems a good place to start.
Starting early has obvious pedagogic advantages. Doing so for everyone can both inc
BASIC on TS-1000 (Score:2)
I got a Timex Sinclair 1000 when I was 10, as well as a simple book about BASIC programming. Eventually, that got upgraded to a TS-2068. There wasn't much family budget for games for me, so I wrote a number of my own. Did a bit of Z80 assembly for better speed. Then when the family got a PC, I learned C, FORTRAN, some Pascal, and 8086 assembly.
ZX Spectrum, C=64 and lots of books (Score:3)
Before I got myself a computer, I spent a lot of time with my friends', typing in programs from computer magazines. I read a lot of books on computers and programming, and tried to understand their example programs.
Learned assembler on the ZX Spectrum, got fluent in Basic on the C=, learned Modula 2 on Amiga and finally C on Amiga and some Sun workstations. I did take some classes on Pascal programming in high-school, and in the Uni, we were taught Java and C++, but I consider myself self-taught.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Myself and most of my friends pretty much taught ourselves to code.
Actually I can't even say that I learned at any one specific point in time. When I was a kid (this was back LONG before anything like a PC, or even DEC mini-computers) I'd go work with my father on the weekends. Before that he taught me electronics, but then at work he'd have me enter his FORTRAN programs on punch cards for him. I must have been 6, so that was the start. Then I remember playing with a PDP-11C a few years later, typing BASIC statements on the TTY and watching it print out answers to simple statements. Years later, around 1980 my uncle gave us a PACE based computer typesetter, and we played with that, read the assembly language book, burned some instructions into ROMS, etc (I think the thing basically ran CP/M, but it had no command interpreter at all). It was right after that when Commodore started pumping out affordable machines, VIC-20 I recall particularly as the first machine I really wrote serious software on (I recall coding a version of Moonlander for that).
I did eventually take some programming classes in college, FORTRAN, Pascal, Assembly language, etc.
Frankly I think this whole "teaching kids to code" thing is overblown. Its fine to expose kids to something like this, and maybe see if a few of them take to it. Imagining that it will do much for the rest or burning a lot of resources on it seems foolish though. Teach them to think and solve problems, they'll figure out the tools.
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I agree that teaching kids to code is not a good idea. I even think high school is too soon. There are very important concepts to learn first. It's like when I was a kid and had a 100-in-1 electronics set. It was fun to play with but I did not understand very much of what was going on. I could not make a circuit of my own that worked except as tweaks to an existing design. I lacked the necessary math and physics background (generally this is first year college stuff).
And of course "coding" is just a too
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Anecdotally, I learned Dartmouth Basic in 1972 in Bellevue Community College to prepare the report for a Physics Lab. Then at University of Washington took Engineering 141 for Fortran programming on CDC6400 thru IBM26 punched cards. In 1973 learned RPG-II(or was it IV I don't remember) to run task scheduling reports for our group on a Varian73. In 1974, I was programming an SDS920 as an ATE to test electronic circuit cards. In 1975 I was programming on PDP-11 RSX11 in Basic and Fortran, and on an HP21MX in
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Forgot to say, Mac OS X came after I retired in 2013 after 38 years of programming.
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I'll add one more. Around 1982, we had to test printed circuit boards with microprocessors. So we had to come up with a way to control the bus from an external device. Fluke 9020 under GPIB from an HP-1000 computer system fit the bill. However, we did not have a specific compiler and loader for that situation. So we had to write the test program in assembly, and then hand assemble it, load it to RAM, and then run it from RAM. It was fun. If you wanted to run a C program, first you had a compiler translate i
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But a large number of professional programmers didn't learn how to code in a formal school program, either because they're self-taught or because they learned on the job. Citation please.
In the early days, many people didn't have anyone to learn from. If you weren't enrolled in a University computer science programme, you probably had close to zero access to formal instruction.
For my part, a colleague of mine came by my desk, saw me struggling to handle a conditional with a macro, and showed me how to create a control structure in Visual Basic. Spent a few months playing and reading MS' Knowledge Base in text mode through a 9600 baud connection. Then I found Kernihan and Ritchie little book
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Just look at all of the shitty, shitty code that's out there. Any professional programmer will have encountered it. It turns out that nearly all of it is the product of these untrained programmers (they like to call themselves "autodidacts" to try to sound better than they are).
My experience is that most of that code is written by people who got a CS degree because they thought it was a good way to earn money. There's also a good body of such work from people who wrote the code because they had to and had some computer background (often IT or EE) but had no real aptitude for coding. The people who learned to code because they wanted to and would code if they had to work nights and weekends at McDonald's if they couldn't make a living coding, generally produce good code (there
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I wanted to "code" but that was very minor. I also wanted to understand computers. I never really trust the programming or engineering aptitude of people who call themselves a "coder". That's like working in the hardware lab and calling yourself a "solderer", or working in a biology lab and calling yourself a "cage cleaner". Sure, not bad jobs, but the goals are not all that lofty.
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Personally, get lots of "software engineering" types and gets a mess. More effort is put into having the correct process than in getting stuff done, arguing over the proper design pattern to use, drawing the UML diagrams correctly, and so forth. Granted if the task is extremely complex then you need some of these tools to manage the complexity - but those tools are just tools and should not become the primary focus.
Sometimes I sense a sort of inferiority complex amongst programmers, where they see all the
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One goal should be able to make the code readable to untrained amateurs perhaps? Obscure code for the purpose of job security is silly. And code that only one programmer on the team understands is dangerous because very often that person will change jobs and leave the original company in a bad position, and I have seen that many many times. If I ever see the attitude that no one else needs to understand the code then that's a programmer I don't want to work with (and who I will give a bad peer review to
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Ha, creative mispelling. I ran into this once. I was working with code that was using a "saclingFactor" all over the place. This was in many files, across many directories. I didn't know what this was so I tried to leave this alone as much as I could, I assumed it was some sort of medical term given that this was a medical machine. Turns out it was just a typo, and should have been "scalingFactor"! But it got copied because either the programmer was too lazy to fix it, or there was some autocompletion
Re: All of the shitty code out there. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can tell your code quality by your arrogant post that just assumes people who don't understand your code aren't trained enough.
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place.
So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
--- Brian Kernigan, "The Elements of Programming Style", 2nd edition, chapter 2
I had this quote framed and put on the wall at the last place I worked were btw, some new guy wanted to tear up perfectly working C and replace it with SCALA so it would be more "modern" and tried to go over my head to do it.. At the job before that, I had to sit there for a week as a possible client went through my code and then decided it looked easy enough that they could re implement it themselves (turns out, no they couldn't)
"Messy" is not about not writing complicated code messy is about being complicated when you don't have to be and not properly abstracting the complicated parts and not commenting the worst parts. Messy is about over depending on order of operations instead of using brackets to make things more clear (to top this off, many compilers screw up order of operations so the code may not be doing what you think). Messy is about doing the same complicated thing 5 times instead of making a function (or even a macro) to do the work. Messy is about not knowing when to split a function into a separate one rather than adding new parameters to the existing function to make it handle more cases.
Don't even get me started on programmers who think cleaning up compile warnings is a waste of time or who split databases for speed reasons (hint: if you are always joining the same 3 tables in every query it's not faster any more)
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There's a variant of this. The EE or science grad that learned a little bit of programming in school then ended up primarily as a programmer as a career. With completely awful code to match if they are more interested in results than in maintenance. Ie, one person said he thought using "const" was a waste of his time.
Granted, CS technically isn't really supposed to teach programming either, it's something you pick up along the way. But at least in CS you should be learning some theory with a wide exposu
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Gee do Word and Excel Macros count? How about doing Maya animation?
Coding usually refers to programming a computer, not just using an app to get a computer to do stuff but writing the app.
Re: What qualifies as coding? (Score:2)
I would day it's ambiguous. I learned coming through BASIC but it was practically a fancy batch script more than a program. After that I learned PHP and it's hard to call that an "application" either. I learned C via cRobots which also isn't an application writing task. I became a proficient programmed learn maxscript for 3ds max. I never wrote a "application" in that either, although it had a user interface and database backend and processed data. All the hallmarks of an application but no executable. I th
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I learned from Logo. Turtle!
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Never had the Turtle, but I did learn Logo on the Apple II, as well as BASIC, Pascal, C and 6502 assembly. All self taught. It was fun.
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comment++
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