Signs you will suck at programming | Hacker News Reader

Signs you will suck at programming

blog.usejournal.com

20 pointszabana8 comments

This post starts off with 'programming is a basic human skill' then lists barriers for success.

Programming is for everyone. There is a reason this planet has both 10 year old and 84 year old developers. We should view programming the way we view using tools or speaking a language. It should be accessible for everyone but a high-skill ceiling to do it really well.

I expect more from someone who works as an educator. Good teachers make average students great.

> Programming is for everyone.

Prove it. I neither agree nor disagree with your statement... I just think it is a very non-trivial assertion to make without substantiating in any meaningful sense.

I can’t think of any “skill” or “orientation” that everyone will have the same amount of. Be it due to nature or nurture, people might have different affinities to different activities and attitudes. Of course, with effort and good guidance those temperamental barriers could probably be overcome. But it takes a very specific attitude to bother spending effort constantly communicating with something as stupid as a computer, and feel sufficient joy for succeeding in controlling it. It would be silly to claim that horse riding or knitting is for everyone. Of course there was a time when many more people did it (sufficiently well) because they had to... but when the need becomes a choice, we see very few people doing it out of interest.

Everybody basically has up to level 1 algebra skills which is not much easier than programming. This was largely not the case in the past. Programming is becoming largely the same thing. Bootcamps are precursors to elementary School classes.

This is just a list of traits that stupid people exhibit. And a top ten list article.

Smart people don’t necessarily feel joy or a rush when solving a problem. They can also often be poor learners having been able to rest on their intellect and not learning how to study during the early years of school.

I highly disagree that this list is merely a proxy for intelligence.

It is, because you could take both those and put them in a list of why you suck at chess.

I was thinking someone ought to write a book, not about how to be smart or how not to be stupid, but about stupid ideas people have about being smart.

Knowing how to ask specific questions

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