Seems easy to blame Facebook for this. I don't like how he called out their algorithms, probably not even knowing how they work. Meanwhile Twitter is just banning alt-right accounts openly, and no one gives a shit.
My guess is that most "OOP-happy" people never get a chance to see beautiful procedural code so they're just afraid of it. A lot of developers nowadays are trained to smite any code that isn't following OOP principles or design.
Not necessarily afraid, possibly just unfamiliar. I can remember programming like this because C++ was the first language I knew well and I was interested in using all the available features. In my mind that was just how things were done. When I had more of an incentive to just Get Stuff Done and keep things maintainable simpler procedural code made a lot more sense.
He uploaded the .exe of his malware to the malware checker sites (like virustotal) and then posted the hashes. You can look up the hashes on virus total and then get the executable.
I wrote a giant explanation about this and then deleted it out of frustration.
Basically, I believe that Senior Engineer is much more than what this article claims. These points are all about mental strategies and confidence, but these have nothing to do with actual technical skill, or plain old experience.
I believe the biggest problem with introductory programming courses is that students are taught two things at once; programming logic and syntax.
To a newbie, rules like ending statements in a semi-colon, wrapping strings in quotes and remembering the casing of a function name can be difficult. Ask them to produce a program with branching and looping with proper syntax and things get needlessly difficult.
I tried teaching a programming class with pseudo code and I found the class seem easier for most than those that had to learn the same material in an actual programming language.
If you could relieve the burden of syntax initially, that's great. But they'll have to learn to carry that burden eventually like the rest of us if they ever want to produce anything of value.
Yeah, i recall poking at basic back in the day and getting that every puzzling "syntax error" back.
Also, there is a mass of bugs out there that come from someone misplacing or forgetting a " or similar.
One thing that is likely needed though is some way to rapidly insert blocks via keyboard, as right now most of these interfaces are overly mouse driven when you want to modify a bunch of blocks quickly.
When I tutored/taught I always found that logic was the root cause of a student's struggle. If you can't understand the logic, there's absolutely no way to understand implementation.
The most unusual situation I've seen when teaching (shit-tier university) was that some students couldn't look at a single ASM instruction and understand what it's doing after being explained the syntax:
ADD R1, R2, R3 ; R2 + R3 --> Store sum in R1
It's almost like some students aren't even ready to learn...o_O
I tend to agree with this. Whenever I'm tutoring and students are having trouble with some piece of syntax, that's almost always the most trivial problem.
I've often encountered students who think they need help with syntax, but in actuality have no understanding of how they're going to actually solve the problem. Conversely, I've never encountered a student who has a good idea of how to solve the problem but just has a syntax error.
This whole "syntax errors cause problems in teaching" thing is something students shouldn't be told. Both because it's pretty untrue on balance, and also because it allows them to blame "syntax" when they write down some copy pasta nonsense and it doesn't work due to compiler errors (completely glossing over the fact that even if there were no compilation errors, the code would still be absurd nonsense.)
With syntac out of the way, they could experiment and iterate with the logic to learn faster. Imagine of legos melted every time you put two together in a way that didn't math the model you were building, and you had to go out and buy a new set.
