Computer Programming as a Liberal Art

[FMCoug]

[YOUTUBE]nKIu9yen5nc[/YOUTUBE]

[BigFatMeanie]

I've tried several times over the years to teach various non-coders about coding. I acknowledge the possibility that I'm a singularly crappy teacher but based on my experiences there are people that just "get it" and people that don't. The ones that don't get it are never going to turn into ones that get it. Those that don't get it may be able to limp along as crappy software developers in dead-end jobs but they will never be great software developers.

So, I agree that everyone should attempt to learn to code but if you are one of the ones that don't "get it", give up and go do something else because I don't want to get stuck fixing the tangled web you'll inevitably end up weaving.

[sparky]

Not sure I want everyone learning to code because it has given me a comfy little niche among a bunch of old-school hardware designers who think coding is voodoo. It's still hard to recruit a good EE who can be dropped into programming project, and there is a huge need.

Also interesting how these big software companies hire hip young coders and give them a resort of sorts to work in. Money to burn? I wonder how well they pay, and how they would look at a going-on-40 with 5 kids who demands good benefits outside of the office. Way different culture than what I'm used to.

[Uncle Ted]

Not sure I want everyone learning to code because it has given me a comfy little niche among a bunch of old-school hardware designers who think coding is voodoo. It's still hard to recruit a good EE who can be dropped into programming project, and there is a huge need.

Also interesting how these big software companies hire hip young coders and give them a resort of sorts to work in. Money to burn? I wonder how well they pay, and how they would look at a going-on-40 with 5 kids who demands good benefits outside of the office. Way different culture than what I'm used to.

Yes, indeed, there is a huge demand for people that live close to the hardware and that can also program. A large fruit company that I used to do some work for was offering $10K bonuses for referring these kinds of people because they couldn't fill the positions with the students coming out of college. Kids these days I are doing Java, Ruby, C#, and concepts like pointers scare the help out of them.

[Uncle Ted]

Programming is not for everyone

Recently, this video, provocatively titled What Schools Don’t Teach, was posted, and has been an internet success. The central message of the film was “anyone and everyone can program”, and it stars famous recognizable wealthy people asserting that point. (By the way, those people obtained their own wealth largely by hiring what they say they want.)

[...]

Makinde Adeagbo, an “early Facebook engineer”, comes on saying that a lot of coding people do is very simple. In a sort of twisted sense, this is true. But I liken that to saying a lot of stuff people do in basketball is also simple, like running across the court or throwing a ball. Running across the court is a necessary element in basketball, but it is certainly not what is sufficient to be successful at it. In fact, you can run across the court so perfectly every time, but be completely unsuccessful.

[...]

Finally, the video starts talking about what it’s like to live the life of a coder. Extravagant offices, free food, lots of play, beautiful views, and of course, lots of money.


I found this almost painful to watch on behalf of other programmers, having personally been through and subsequently being hired by one of the places they film: Facebook.


It is true that all of those things exist, but it’s definitely the exception, not the norm, for a programmer. Most offices come equipped with a coffee machine, and a fridge to put your own food, often crowded with other people’s food that has been sitting there all week. They are in office buildings with gray cubicles, and they are fueled by stringent bureaucracy.

So, all I have to do is get hired at Facebook. They just told me it is easy. They are hiring tons and learning to code isn’t hard, it’s just intimidating.

Except it’s not. Almost everything that this video purports to be true is negated by the very companies that are represented in that video. The Facebook interview process requires a whole lot more than “addition and subtraction”, and isn’t purely fun and games in terms of problems they give you to solve. One of their interview questions requires an understanding of calculus, another one requires the ability to reason about time and space complexities of highly recursive functions, and another requires knowledge of abstract tools that programmers use, such as regular languages and automata.

[...]

Quite simply, programming is not for everyone. It is not an absolutely fun and delightful task as it’s portrayed to be in videos like the aforementioned or movies like “The Social Network”. It is rarely an invigorating social activity. A lot of time, it’s sitting in front of a computer screen, looking at a colorful text document, and thinking, and thinking, and typing, getting angry, and wondering why the hell you’re living a life sitting down.

[U-Ute]

Yes, indeed, there is a huge demand for people that live close to the hardware and that can also program. A large fruit company that I used to do some work for was offering $10K bonuses for referring these kinds of people because they couldn't fill the positions with the students coming out of college. Kids these days I are doing Java, Ruby, C#, and concepts like pointers scare the help out of them.

We lament this fact in our office often.

Universities are more about teaching high level concepts about data structures and algorithms and less about low level details. So they do all of their assignments in garbage collected languages and have little to no concept of memory management or cache coherency. The sad part is that processors are so fast these days that the real bottleneck is accessing memory, but nobody is teaching anything about this. In a world where CPU speeds are around 3GHz and you can do a floating point operation in one clock cycle, spending 700-1000 cycles waiting for a memory fetch is a great waste of cycles.

Without this kind of knowledge, we have a lot of programmers writing inefficient code because they're trying to noodle with algorithms to get rid of that extra floating point multiply, when in fact they need to reorganize their data to do one less memory fetch.

[FMCoug]

We lament this fact in our office often.

Universities are more about teaching high level concepts about data structures and algorithms and less about low level details. So they do all of their assignments in garbage collected languages and have little to no concept of memory management or cache coherency. The sad part is that processors are so fast these days that the real bottleneck is accessing memory, but nobody is teaching anything about this. In a world where CPU speeds are around 3GHz and you can do a floating point operation in one clock cycle, spending 700-1000 cycles waiting for a memory fetch is a great waste of cycles.

Without this kind of knowledge, we have a lot of programmers writing inefficient code because they're trying to noodle with algorithms to get rid of that extra floating point multiply, when in fact they need to reorganize their data to do one less memory fetch.

Great point. Don't get me started on how these same folks use/abuse databases.

[FMCoug]

A co-worker and I were discussing this the other day. What percentage of Java or C# programmers even understand OO concepts? Not that many.

[Uncle Ted]

A co-worker and I were discussing this the other day. What percentage of Java or C# programmers even understand OO concepts? Not that many.

I would guess more than those that understand computer architecture concepts like what U-Ute mentioned above.

[Jeff Lebowski]

[jay santos]

This thread started out with the purpose to say everyone should get some exposure to computer programming, which I agree with wholeheartedly. Good thread.

Then it devolved into why CS grads and young programmers today don't write efficient code. Very nerdy. Bad thread.

[FMCoug]

I would guess more than those that understand computer architecture concepts like what U-Ute mentioned above.

Agreed. But it's still not that high. One of the downsides of modern languages is that almost anyone can hack together the right libraries and make something that "works".

[jay santos]

jinx

[Jeff Lebowski]

jinx

I beat you by one minute. You owe me a soda.

[FMCoug]

Interesting real world example of what was discussed above from a meeting i had Friday. Company A purchases Company B. They are in the same business and each has an application that does the same thing with about the same volume of transactions.

Company A has a database server with 4 cores, 24GB of RAM, and local storage. It is underutilized if anything.

Company B's server is 64 cores, 288 GB of RAM, SAN storage. And they day they need two add more resources.

:screwy: