There is a difference between knowing how to write code and being a "software developer". I think a lot of people confuse the two. I am an Engineer (not the software kind) I write code almost every day in my job but I do not identify myself as a programmer. For me code is a tool to be used to solve a problem, like Calculus or Linear Algebra.
When I was at Uni we were required to take two subjects through the computer science faculty, "Intro to algorithms and data structures" and "Fundamentals of Software Engineering". The first subject was hugely interesting and I "Got it" right away. It was basically teaching you how to represent a problem computationally, we learnt about Binary and floating point representaion, what a stack was that sort of thing. This is heap sort, this is bubble sort, this is O(N) this is O(Log N) it clicked for me.
The second subject not so much. It was all about Unit tests, object oriented programming, the waterfall model. We had to write an essay about Ariane V failure. The lecturer was really big on a guy called Bertrand Meyer and his ideas about design by contract. The subject was really hard to engage with and almost caused me to lose interest completely. It was probably a good subject to learn if you were planning a career in software development but for a first year engineer not so much.
As cruel as it sounds I think the best way to teach someone to code is to explain algorithms and data to them. "Here's a Ruby tutorial try to follow along and you to can be a programmer" is dishonest and in my opinion not learning the fundamentals up front is what causes that "chasm of dispair" the article aludes to.
When I was at Uni we were required to take two subjects through the computer science faculty, "Intro to algorithms and data structures" and "Fundamentals of Software Engineering". The first subject was hugely interesting and I "Got it" right away. It was basically teaching you how to represent a problem computationally, we learnt about Binary and floating point representaion, what a stack was that sort of thing. This is heap sort, this is bubble sort, this is O(N) this is O(Log N) it clicked for me.
The second subject not so much. It was all about Unit tests, object oriented programming, the waterfall model. We had to write an essay about Ariane V failure. The lecturer was really big on a guy called Bertrand Meyer and his ideas about design by contract. The subject was really hard to engage with and almost caused me to lose interest completely. It was probably a good subject to learn if you were planning a career in software development but for a first year engineer not so much.
As cruel as it sounds I think the best way to teach someone to code is to explain algorithms and data to them. "Here's a Ruby tutorial try to follow along and you to can be a programmer" is dishonest and in my opinion not learning the fundamentals up front is what causes that "chasm of dispair" the article aludes to.