This is a pretty poor article on the whole. These "reasons" aren't supported by anything other than conjecture. Should be titled "10 reasons why I think it could be that some people suck at programming, based on my personal biases on the topic and on no actual data."
On top of that, the writing is loose, the ideas aren't really thought through. Basically, it's just someone's spontaneous, unrefined brain fart on the topic.
Sorry if the author is reading this, but it's honest feedback. You can do better than this piece of linkbaiting trash.
I'm the actual author but thanks for the feedback I'll put it into good use. I'm new into this type of writing so I was expecting my first article to be not that great.
Either way, its helped me a lot since I've learned in ways I could improve further articles.
But why did you mention it to be a piece of linkbaiting trash? Links posted were to support my reasons. Also, I didn't collect any data since this was done through the help of other programmers so its not really a brain fart in the sense.
I think maybe you're unfamiliar with the term "linkbaiting." It refers to an article that is sensational and uses attention-grabbing techniques to get people to link to it.
The whole article feels loose and disconnected - probably as a result of the way you sourced the ideas. If you got them emailed in by different people, it's no surprise that it feels like a collection of unrelated points rather than like a cohesive article.
That's another problem with these points, too. They're not the result of some reflection to come up with some key reasons why people suck at programming, they're just the first things that popped into the heads of the people who emailed you. Because of this, the article goes only skin-deep in what would otherwise be an interesting topic. Instead of insight, it provides only a superficial list of obvious, unresearched ideas. This kind of content may fly on a general interest site, but on a site like HN, which is filled with programmers who have spent time thinking about why programming is hard, it is just bad.
Let's take one of the "points" apart:
Before I help anyone with their code, I ask to see their algorithm. If they can’t provide it, I tell them to develop one and nearly all the time they’ll figure out why their program didn’t work.
Huh, what? That doesn't even make sense. Most programs don't involve much or any algorithmic design. Are you sure you know what an algorithm is? Or what a program is? What kind of program are you talking about? How do people "show you" their algorithms? What does it even mean to "show
the algorithms" for a Ruby-on-Rails app?
An algorithms is the framework, and basis, of a program. Many beginners don’t develop one, and write as it goes. When that happens, they lose track of their direction in solving the problem and it becomes difficult debugging. – Benjamin
Who's Benjamin? Why is his opinion relevant to this topic? Also, what a silly opinion. Most programmers I know, experts many of them, and myself included, do not spend time "developing their algorithm" before writing code. I assume by algorithm you mean pseudo-code of some sort. If you have to write pseudo-code before you can write real code, then you really do suck at programming. As a programmer, this point makes me feel that you don't know what you're talking about.
So next time, save yourself some time and jot your plan of attack on a piece of paper. Start programming until you know how to solve your problem. I do it, and it works amazingly.
Again... most programming problems are trivially easy once you know how to solve them, but in many cases you don't know how to solve them before you do it. And the language you "write your algorithm" in should be the language you're writing your program is. In this paragraph we also see an example of loose writing: "Start programming until you know how to solve your problem"... did you mean "Don't start programming...?" That would make more sense in the context of the article. This kind of mistake makes it hard to take the article seriously, because you're already on a flimsy basis to begin with.
You don’t want your program looking like this poor guy, Asimo falling down stairs, do you? So plan accordingly!
What a poor example! Most programmers with some intelligence would love to be able to write the insanely complex code responsible for allowing Asimo to fall down the stairs. AI code is some of the hardest on Earth, disrespecting that suggest you don't understand this basic point.
Sure, I'll give it to you about the loose links and resources.
But I still can't agree with you on one point. Many people suffer when they don't have pseudo-code or a basic algorithm for solving a problem. Even something simple like a recursive algorithm, I've seen people can't solve it because they start programming without ever thinking about it.
I know some people are naturally gifted and programming is trivial for them but its not the same for everyone.
Also, I can start writing code without writing an algorithm. These tips were meant to describe why people initially can't program not continue programming. So please don't assume beyond what is written in the article.
But either way, thanks for the criticism. Like I mentioned before, I'll use it to improve my writing and avoid future mistakes. Sure, my English isn't the best since its not my native language and I normally haven't written much aside from technical and research documents.
Most programs don't involve much or any algorithmic design.
Indeed, but I was consistently surprised at how students with no prior programming experience were bad at even basic algorithmic thinking. Things that to you and me are afterthoughts took fifteen minutes (or more) of patient back-and-forth between me and the student, including diagrams, analogies and examples.
I think English is not the author's first language; it shows up in the article and in his posts here. We tend to be understanding of poor grammar here, but the instinctive reaction to flawed English is that the message is also flawed. While it is possible to work out what the author meant, it takes some consideration - that consideration is better spent on the ideas.
Writing should be like a window, that you can see clearly through - not one you have to keep checking to see if it's a mark on the window or what you're supposed to be seeing. Excellent writing disappears.
So, TalkBinary, if you're genuinely interested in writing, improving your English is crucial. It might seem prejudiced to criticize your English, but it is the first thing people see about your writing, and because their time is limited, they will judge it on that basis. swombat has given a lot of his time to you - although it can be harsh to hear negative comments, this is valuable advice you have received. It might also seem that grammar and spelling etc are secondary, and shouldn't matter (I used to feel this), but they really do - if you want to communicate. Hell, even when I read my own writing months later, any spelling errors etc are very distracting, and if I haven't been clear it is hard for even me, the author, to understand.
I'm not sure of the best way for you to improve, but the first thing is for you to want to. The second thing is to get feedback - swombat has given you a start (and I agree with all his writing points). If you can handle it, seek out further feedback and criticism. If you are in school/uni, you can probably find someone there to help also. The third thing is to take action on it - such as rewriting this article with the errors corrected.
Finally, I wanted to fill out one of swombat's points: writing out an algorithm can be crucial. I just spent the last two months getting one clear (I did have a go at coding it directly earlier on, but it wasn't clear enough). Once I was clear, it just took a day (today) to design, code and debug. Now, this is unusual; I'm doing research on relationships between grammars for a startup. Mostly it's not needed, as swombat says. But after two months, I just wanted to speak up for one of those problems that is not in the "most" category (though I'm inclined to think that all problems are trivially easy once you know how to solve them; similar to how mathematician can only do "trivial" proofs.)
I actually think the ideas quoted above are actually good ones, if you're not clear on what you're doing (though annoyingly expressed). Exploratory programming is also helpful. I find it's a mix; it depends how complex the problem is, how many different issues there are - and crucially - how much experience you have with that kind of program. Familiar problems are easy to solve in your head or at the keyboard. I used to always work that way, until I got into grammar stuff.
BTW: if you purely compiled this, so it's not your writing, remember that as editor, it's even more important that you are able to write well, so as to improve - edit - the writing of others. Anyway, good luck, I think the article is hepful overall, good on you for actually doing something and having a go, and I hope you start to take this opportunity, of room for improvement.
Thanks for the comment. I understand as a writer that all I can do is improve my writing. So sure, I don't really mind people criticizing me for my writing. On the other hand, I love to hear what others have to say when I can improve on something.
I just don't like hearing people assume and start talking about things where I don't think its entirely true.
As you, I also believe writing out an algorithm is crucial. Sure, you can get away with it most of the times but once the problem becomes more abstract, difficult, and interesting then it's essential.
I think swombat was definitely rude in his first comment calling it a "fart" and "trash". Name-calling is labeling, and is neither accurate nor helpful in a cognitive sense; and is abusive and disrespectful in a social sense; and it appears to be based on a strong personal emotion of anger, rather than an objective appraisal. It has no place in a civil and intellectual forum. But this is the internet. It's never been a civil and intellectual forum, including here, despite what many HN users would like. Even associate professors, when online, do it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1611007
The best we can do is to seek the grain of truth in what someone says, because they often do have a point, disregard the rest, and not fall into name-calling ourselves. It's just about impossible to stop someone from being rude; but we can stop ourselves from taking it personally. And the most effective way to do that is to fully accept any legitimate criticism they have, and totally discard the rest. The rudeness belongs to them, not to you, and you can bet it causes them all sorts of problem. One should therefore feel sympathy for person who has been rude (including oneself.)
That said, let me unpack what (I think) was meant: by "brain fart", he's upset about the writing itself, and that the ideas have not been thought out carefully. He sees it as carelessness, and is offended. Whereas I see it as a lack of ability, with English not being the authors' first language. But I agree that you and the other authors can improve on this - as he said "you can do better than this".
By "link-bait trash", I think he means that you have written this article for the purpose of getting hits, and not primarily out of interest in the content, nor for a wish to communicate it. From the article, and what you've said here, it does come across that way - but I find it very hard to judge, because of the language issue. Poor communication can lead to all sorts of problems!
He could have written these thoughts out objectively, without name-calling; as a result of not doing that, he has offended you. When a person feels attacked and offended, it is distracting for them, and makes it difficult for them to appreciate the actual content of the criticism (it even tends to pressure people to go against the criticism). Name-calling undermines one's purpose.
I hope the above makes it easier for you to accept the content, and disregard the insult.
You can begin by asking yourself what the purposes of the article were - was getting hits the primary purpose? It might not be "entirely true", but is it partly true? If so, admit it to yourself, and then you can move on. Having an objective and factual perspective makes you (largely) immune to insult.
(BTW: I have a more nuanced view of writing out algorithms. It's definitely useful at times, but it's not always the best one (not crucial or essential). A danger is that writing can concretize your conception of the problem (eg an incorrect assumption); whereas beginning to code can give you information. Have you ever gone to a lot of trouble to get clear on a problem, and then when you start to code it, you immediately realize that you misunderstood it, meaning that all that time was wasted? (and if you've become attached to that misunderstanding, you may fight the evidence, or not even see it, because not open to it). Writing algorithms definitely has its place, it's a mix.)
"I'm the actual author but thanks for the feedback I'll put it into good use. I'm new into this type of writing so I was expecting my first article to be not that great...And poor? Honestly, I don't think its that bad."
Your final remark is the best way to guarantee you never write anything great. You begin by saying you appreciate the feedback but end saying you think it wasn't bad.
The better way to close, instead of getting defensive:
I mentioned it wasn't as bad as the initial comment.
I appreciate the constructive criticism. Next time I'll make sure I deliver on what everyone is saying.
And linkbaiting, why lie? I tried it out for a reason but ultimately I only chose ten because I received 10 reasons from other people. They all weren't only "my" ideas. I mentioned it at the end of the post.
Yeah, I have to concur. It's sloppy writing. If the author had focused on, say, three thoughtful ideas on why programming is hard for beginners, along with some remedies, he might have turned out something of value. Instead, the stretch for hitting the magic linkbait number of 10 gets us a fairly mediocre exploration of an important, interesting topic.
Incidentally, the comment thread here turned up some great discussion on why programming is so hard for beginners, so gg, HN.
> "So if you find yourself lacking some motivation, maybe thats why you aren’t that great. Go find it and last time I checked, money pushes so many people forward."
The problem is that money isn't motivation to actually enjoy programming. When you start coding to get money, you're seeing coding as means to an end, and not an end in and of itself. That sucks all the fun out of coding just for its own sake.
I used to love coding games. Then I realized I could sell them for money. I started making games at a much faster rate in order to make more money, but suddenly the game making part was not as much fun any more. I wasn't pushing my own boundaries any more; instead, I was just rehashing what I already knew and had already made into new layouts to create another game. Once I realized this, I stopped selling games, but enjoying coding just for coding took a while to fully came back. I could argue that it only just now came back, about a year after I stopped selling my games.
Interesting. I'm wondering though, was it really one or the other? Weren't you able to just continue doing it for fun and exploring new ideas, but sell just because/when they reached some specific level of quality?
Or did the business side take over just because... well - it's good to get money for the work?
One of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of beginners make, is that they don't break the problem up into sub problems that they can easily solve. What I always tell students is to write some code, and then test it right away. Too many students try and solve the entire problem without compiling once, and then they are bewildered when they have 1000 errors because they forgot a semicolon at the end of each line.
I intentionally program in that style all the time, especially in the absence of a REPL. It's really not much different than writing it out with pen + paper first.
It lets me get the idea out of my head and on to the screen where it can be criticized. Tracking down syntax errors, missing includes, compiler flags, etc. is enough of an independent activity that I often want to do it all at once at the end of the first brain dump. At the beginning I want to be shitting out code, not googling for solutions to GCC's vague neuroses. After that first dump is done and validated, I use it as the first commit and iterate from there.
I prefer to write it out with pen and paper. After all, most of what you do when you code is come up with a solution to a problem and then implement it. It's a lot easier to play with your solution when you're still forming it than after you've already typed it up.
Code is also difficult to read. It's much easier to understand a code flow diagram, or something similar, than it is to comprehend the 100 or so lines that the diagram represents.
I do too (and wow isn't it a wonderful feeling on the rare time when you write a whole page of code and it compiles and runs right the first time?) but I certainly couldn't do that when I first started, and trying to do so just made me get lost in a morass of logic mistakes and compiler error messages. It seems like lots of beginning programmers naturally want to write a ton of code right out of the gate and they have to be taught to do otherwise.
After a few years of teaching new recruits how to program, this still amazes me: so many people will go a day without compiling once!
I mean, I've been programming professionally for 7 years, and much more before. But whenever I need to do something that I haven't done in the last week or so, I still always start with a tiny function to make sure I still remember how to do even the basic stuff, and build from there. E.g., every time I write some new js code, I start with a function that only prints something to the console; then, does the basic functionality, printing results to console; then and only then, start doing more complex things. It always surprises me that people will spend a day or more working without checking even the most basic check that what they're doing works the way they expect.
This is without a doubt a huge benefit of IDEs (and compiled languages, since with interpreted you don't really get the same benefit). I wish more people realized how great the benefit of this: I suspect most people dismiss it without ever trying.
This is the normal way that I write code. But sometimes I feel really confident and write a couple hundred lines without compiling. Then it's always fun to find out - did everything "just work" or did I omit something?
That's pretty much exactly what I do too- I'll start with maybe 10-15 lines before testing. I don't know why ANYONE would go a day without compiling or running
coding is very different kind of task, requiring a very different sort of approach, to the kinds of tasks most people are familiar with. most other tasks are no way near as exacting, etc. we are creatures of habit, we approach new tasks with the kinds of approaches we are familiar with using, and it simply takes time to learn how to approach programming.
I haven't seen that attitude before, but recently an idealist graduate joined my team. I can't remember now how many times lately I had to tell "Yes, it has bugs, but writing a new implementation would take a year, so we're just going to patch the library."; "No, it doesn't have a documentation - check if it behaves correctly."; "No, it really doesn't need to be a fully speced system on its own JVM, it doesn't need more than a shell script."; "Yes, requirements change, get used to that."...
Of course we'd all love to have 100% correct, documented libraries, specs which are unambiguous, properly designed code that will stay at version 1.0.0 and with same API forever... Well - it just doesn't work like that, even if it's a good thing to aim for. I can swear every day at some RFCs and the bunch of monkeys who wrote them, but that doesn't mean it's going away. It's already out there - if you have time, build something better. If you don't... take a break, breathe, come back and make it work.
Of course we'd all love to have 100% correct, documented libraries, specs which are unambiguous, properly designed code that will stay at version [4.x] and with same API forever...
I have to agree. When I started writing code for a research group I was frustrated because the library didn't have any documentation and the coding was difficult to understand.
When I started writing code, I became frustrated and couldn't write code because half the time I couldn't deal with it. I talked with the professor and after a long conversation, he simply told me to deal with it. So I did.
A month later, I had learned so much from the library by just reading snippets of code and testing it. Before I knew it, I was writing code non-stop.
I would say that people "initially suck at programming" because most people
a) think and behave quite illogically in their day to day lives
b) express themselves in generalities and don't think in enough detail (which makes sense when your primary interaction is with other humans, it simply isn't necessary) to communicate their ideas to the degree that programming generally requires.
In other words, programming is the first actually technical subject they ever studied. http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical (High school math is a technical subject, but it's rarely studied as such.)
I've been finding that in order to motivate myself for programming I have to not think of it in terms of, "sigh, a basic GUI front end for MySQL....". I have to make myself identify some interesting problem, or new skill which challenges and interests me. That way I feel motivated to work through the easy stuff I've done before because then I can work on the interesting problem.
I think problem with lot of bad programmers are that they do not take the top down approach and often get way too attached into the micro-details when they are just beginning. From my experience, it invites a lot of trouble. They open the editor and start coding stuff when they don't even have big picture in their head. Not only this increases the total time to have it developed by 2-3 folds, but you get stuck at times. It just makes programming so much easier when you spend couple hours thinking about the problem before you actually throw yourself into actual coding. This is probably the biggest lesson I have learnt about programming.
On top of that, the writing is loose, the ideas aren't really thought through. Basically, it's just someone's spontaneous, unrefined brain fart on the topic.
Sorry if the author is reading this, but it's honest feedback. You can do better than this piece of linkbaiting trash.