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Would you please not tear other people down like this on Hacker News, regardless of what you think of their project? Even if you're right on some underlying points, it degrades the community badly.

>I'd expect anyone working as a developer in IT to have learned this much before calling themselves a professional.

According to author's webpage[1], he's a "student at the University of Waterloo, class of 2021".

So probably age 17 or 18. He's not passing himself off as a "professional".

If majority of HN readers feel this article was beneath their skill level and a waste of time, that's more on the submitter (mxstbr) for misjudging its value to the HN audience rather than the article's author.

(Although at this time, the article does have 110 upvotes while simultaneously, the top-voted comment (poster mmjaa) is critical about its simplistic banality. So maybe the submitter got the pulse correct for half of the HN split-personality?)

[1] http://lpan.io/

> According to author's webpage[1], he's a "student at the University of Waterloo, class of 2021".

> So probably age 17 or 18. He's not passing himself off as a "professional".

Fair enough, though I am still surprised he hadn't learned that in formal education already. I was taught about event driven programming before I got to university. The schools I went to weren't particularly good either so it's not like I had a "better" education or come from privilege.

Maybe they just don't teach event-driven programming any more? :(

Assumption is...

I actually wasn't making an assumption, I was talking from my own experiences. Myself and my friends did learn about event-driven programming prior to university.

We were taught both Visual Basic and Pascal and taught the difference between event driven (VB) and procedural (Pascal). Though weirdly we were never taught about OOP, but it was a fairly average UK college and a pretty general computing course so there was a lot to cover in 2 years.

Most students have close to zero programming training of any kind before getting to university in Canada.

Maybe this is where regional differences come out as most students in the UK have had some programming lessons before starting uni (albeit they often haven't done any recreational programming).

That was my observations at the time anyway. Things may have changed and/or I might have introduced selection bias by hanging around with the nerdier kids. Who knows - too late to find out now.

Maybe this is where regional differences come out as most students in the UK have had some programming lessons before starting uni

At the level of professional-standard software architecture for UIs?

There have been some positive efforts in the UK over the past few years to introduce programming as a more serious subject at secondary school level (roughly, ages 11-18). I think it's great if kids get to write a simple mobile app to chat with their friends or make a simple game, instead of only learning things like how to use a word processor or graphics program. I think it's great if there are teachers in schools who themselves have the skills and knowledge to help the kids do that, too.

However, there are plenty of new starters entering the industry who have just graduated with degrees in CS or related subjects from good universities and still won't have been exposed to these kinds of ideas at more than a trivial level. I'd be surprised and impressed if I had a school-leaver turn up for an interview for a programming position with more than a passing knowledge of these subjects.

For what it's worth, I don't think the original author does themselves any favours by inflating their experience as they do. The way they describe themselves in the introduction on their web site seems rather out of proportion to their actual experience, and their CV screams "I read a guide to how to write impressive-sounding CVs and I'm trying way too hard". But as a card-carrying member of the "I thought I knew everything at the start of my career and tried way too hard" club, I think you just have to see that as a combination of genuine enthusiasm and understandable immaturity, and give them credit for having a go and sharing their experience. I'm happy to see someone at that stage in their development taking an interest and spending the time to experiment and discuss and learn, and surely we should all be encouraging the next generation of programmers along that path?

Lucky you, most of my peers in college had no formal programming experience from hs coming in. I did, but we barely even grazed oop, and I come from a pretty decent highschool. Be careful with anecdotes, your personal experience doesn't represent the general population

Are you kidding me? At his age I didn't know what programming was.

Give him a break.

A student in the class fo 2021 in software engineering at Waterloo would currently be about to go into their 2A term:

https://uwaterloo.ca/software-engineering/current-undergradu...

(click on course sequence)

The first year of SE is almost purely mathematics and electromagnetism. The first year programming courses are simple and are designed to simply get people up to speed who may have never programmed before (most already have).

The course which focuses on even-driven programming for user interfaces is 'CS 349 User Interfaces' which isn't until the 3A term. This is the course where students are exposed to MVC, observer pattern, avoiding polling etc. Second year term is also where you would get a lot of exposure to state machines.

As a note to the author of this post: Don't take any criticism that appears elsewhere in these comments too harshly. People who comment here often don't take much time to pay attention to the person who actually made their contributions, and as a result their level of expectations are usually the same regardless of whether a piece of work is created by someone who is a tenured professor, or a first year university student. If you continue to write and work on projects like this, you'll turn out great in the long run. You'll also grow thick skin.

LOL! :-)

As I said elsewhere, I think this is clearly an article for a junior audience. But I think he did an good enough job at explaining his main concepts to his peers/readers. In fact, the whole "I coded an editor in C" is at best a irrelevant eye-catcher, as you can copy-paste about a gazillion implementations from anywhere. So because of that, any seasoned dev should probably not fall for such a "catchy" header in the first place... :-)

http://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/ http://www.cprogramming.com/texteditors.html http://jwu.50webs.com/Archive/src/simted3/simted3.pdf ... [ad nauseam]

> It feels like frontend development is a place where people go if they like the idea of coding but can't be bothered to learn how to actually programme.

Maybe they go into it because of the incredible demand.

From the article.

"viw helped me understand what UI development is really about."

Nobody writes something like that if he is 'soap boxing his experiences as if the topic isn't entry level stuff'.