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Comment by rw | Hacker News Reader

Bullshit alarm!

Are we really going to state, as educators, that some people just aren't cut out for thinking rationally?

Some people aren't cut out for the particular style of thought needed to write algorithms in a programming language, yes. Or at least some people require disproportionately more instruction to succeed and thus are likely to always fail in a college intro programming course.

Agreed. Some people just aren't as effective at abstract symbol manipulation. I've found that people who can pick up programming languages can pick up other human languages and vice versa.

This doesn't mean that they can't learn programming. It means that they would be much better off focusing on their strengths instead. There's a difference between "can't do it" and "fails course" as you rightly suggest.

Actually, these test results were not able to be reproduced even by the author(s). So while it was predictive of the set of people the paper was written for, unfortunately it isn't any use outside of that.

Citation - Second comment by the blog's author Mark Guzdial: http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3LAWVXC1EE119

Are we really going to state, as educators, that some people just aren't cut out for thinking rationally?

Speaking as a sometime educator, I think you can afford to lose the last word.

I remember how I learned to program. My parents had a Timex Sinclair with no tape drive and 4K of RAM, so if you wanted to use a program, you had to type it in, in BASIC, from scratch. The computer came with a book of programs. I just looked at the programs, figured out what they did, and started writing my own modifications. I think I was around 5 years old.

I guess I must have just been "born rational", if you're going to equate programming ability with rationality.

But what makes you think that the "programming gear" I had - the quality of a born hacker, by which the first time we look at any piece of code, anywhere, any time in our life, at any age, we instantly know how to program - is equivalent to "rationality"? Or even "intelligence"?

There are physicists who cannot learn to program, apparently. This shocks me. But if I can learn to program at age five without instruction, and a physicist cannot learn to program with instruction, that makes it pretty darn plausible to me that yes, there is a "programming gear".

PS: How the hell can you be a physicist and not be able to write computer programs? WTF, human brain?

Its easier to learn programming when you're a kid. Its easier to learn natural languages when you're a kid. How long would it take an adult to learn a second natural language to conversational fluency? Some people can do it in six months or less. Some will never achieve it.

Are we really going to state, as educators, that some people just aren't cut out for thinking rationally?

Sarcasm?

No.

Maybe someone who fails this test won't pass a class their first time through, but I find it hard to believe that any test can determine that someone, given time and practice, cannot be a programmer.

Not all brains were created equal.

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