On Monday, April 29, 2002, at 09:05 , Anthony Beaman wrote:
> I posted a similar question recently and got great answers! My problem
> with coding is that the learning process seems mysterious at times. I
> guess I'm used to a cut and dried approach to things and learning to code
> isn't, or am I wrong?
Part of what you are running into here is that 'coding' in its
many manifestations runs the gauntlet from:
Professional Standards
Empirical Arts
Psychotic Episodes
Don't Mind My Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Sheer Madness Embodied
so if at times most of the coders you read are, well, MUTANTS, its
because, well most of them are. The two principle lies that the
academic world tells corporate management are
Software Engineering
Computer Science
the later as an improper subset of the mathematics at times tangentally
associates, by a long and twisty path, to what goes on in coding. But
rarely has didly to actually do with 'pushing product'.
The former is sheer non-sense. The Engineering Schools should never
have allowed this blasphemy - since the Engineering process has deep
roots firmly planted in the 'real world' - where as the closest that most
code monkies get to that is the occasional moment - if they are lucky,
when they are writing device drivers and actually encounter the physical
world and the reality of 'rotational rates' or 'the speed of light' -
otherwise they really worry solely about esoterica like
Fully Re-Intrant Coding
as they need not encounter 'the real world' where 'real time' is 'real'
and not a really skanky approximation based upon the CPU rating and
the general system overhead of running which ever bloated Operating
System is used to shovel their poetry into registers in, on, or
near a von nueman 'engine'.
At which point we get into 'holy wars' about religious doctrines,
that make us closer to the scholastics of the medieval era - rather
than the pomposity of being 'technology' - since what employers
really want are 'wizards' and 'daemon keepers' - whom they can
shovel into the backroom, so as not to panic the proper clientel,
but who some how make all of that voodoo work.
So while Academics, IETF, IEEE, and ACM go bed hopping with the
various Corporate shills hustling this that and the next piece of
techNoir occult rituals as the trend de jure of how to 'formalize'
and 'enhance' the code monkey process, the reality remains that
the Mutants in the back room do this because in the main they are
not fit and proper subjects to be let out of their cages to see
the light of day, where they will panic that
the big ball of fire in the sky is BAD OMEN.
> For example, sometimes I'm not sure which books to read or in what order
> or what source code to study or how to study or how good you have to get
> before you can get a job coding or how to get good at coding, etc., The
> problem is that no one write books that say:
How to Constructively Interoperate your Psychotic Disorder
with the growing field of technology to make money.
Which is what we really need - since how many folks here are still
worrying about building cross platform technologies to provide
virtual paper tape readers so that they retain their PDP8 source
code base on their PDP11 ???? { and that was only 20 years ago! }
We have what? Fifty Years of 'technical history' back to turing
and grace hopper, von nueman???? { not exactly a list of folks
that most people would want to have at a proper lawn party... }
Admiral Hopper even admits that she developed compilers because
she was lazy and wanted to get the mathematicians back to doing
mathematics.... { is anyone really surprised by this? Nor that
Larry Wall would canonize this as one of the three cardinal virtues!}
> Whenever I speak to aspiring coders they express similar concerns and
> questions. Is there any info (general advice, life experiences, sites,
> etc.FAQ's, etc.) about the process of learning to program? Thanks!
I expect that in the next 25 years of professional code monkeying
that I will port my basic suite of abstractions into at least six
new language implementations.
As we all know, the Apocalypse is Coming, Perl6 is not going to
be merely perl5++, and hence we all should have been coding in
a) ruby
b) python
c) java
d) visual basic
e) Object Oriented Cobol
or stayed with being awkward about what was sed.
Based upon the limited experience the planet went through with
the 'dot.com crash' - there is some hope that we can forestall
the next "children's crusade" for at least a hundred years - or
until folks forget about the problem of trying to sell vaporware.
Basic problem with sorting out how to sort out software stuff
remains that it will always be easier for the Mutants - because
they are just 'built' that way - the normals will have to live
with trying to impose order and reasoning on a process that
has evolved because of the Mutants...
So if you can teach them the basic core abstrations:
memory management
the thing in itself
the thing as referenced
viable conceptual metaphors
just because one speaks of objects and methods
doth not mean that at implementation time one
need do that in OO....
the basic quatraine:
and knowing their implementation specifics in this language
on the variable front - what is the memory management model
functions of course includes - forked child processes....
variables
iteratives
conditionals
functions
Oh yes, Regular Expressions,
or how to abstract an abstraction
Finite State Automatons
or how to get lines to other geometric shapes
in lieu of learning to write it in egyptian hierogliphics
At which point folks MIGHT want to look at the whole problem
of how to impose any form of proper analysis on the buzzPhraseGenerators
who assert that one should learn
code_language_foo
because of technoJargon....
No, the problem remains that software wrangling is a serious
mental disorder and people should be working on a cure for it!
Teach the next generation to get into some proper profession:
Drug Dealer
Arms Merchant
3rd World Dictator
Chartered Public Accountant
LumberJack
{ right, none of that... that is just silly.... }
rather than embark upon the perpetuation of this EVIL!!!!
ciao
drieux
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