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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

> If a student has trouble transferring their knowledge of programming fundamentals

“Programming fundamentals” isn’t the same from language to language. It’s inconceivable that a student who learned to program with python would develop the same type of fundamental understanding as a student who used C (to develop an understanding of memory-level APIs) or Haskell (to develop an understanding of type and semantic theories).

> which is a failure of teaching and testing, not some sort of 'limitation' in the student.

This is a bold claim. I don’t think everyone can understand computer science.

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> I don’t think everyone can understand computer science.

This is a bold claim. None of us are special for working in tech. Our life has presented us the opportunity and passion to invest ourselves deeply in the field, often at great opportunity cost.

Saying that a bad teacher makes no difference in student outcomes is equally ridiculous as saying an excellent teacher makes no difference in student outcomes. If that's the case, we should be able to replace professors with cardboard cutouts, no? I was a student and TA long enough to witness directly the impact that a thoughtful curriculum can have on students.

The person you responded to didn't make any claims about bad teachers or good teachers. The claim is that not everyone can understand computer science. As an extreme example do you think a person who is mentally disabled can understand computer science? From my perspective it's clear to me that not everyone can understand computer science and the same applies to many academic areas.

Not everyone can understand computer science, but I think the OP meant that your socioeconomic status matters more - gradual learning from age 10 makes college-level education a breeze compared to being disadvantaged well into high school and only using computers in order to live and use essential services.

I agree that the whole bad vs. good teachers thing is off-topic, though.

The grandparent comment was about teaching, so I interpreted the parent comment to mean that "innate ability matters much more than good teaching", which my personal experience teaching people disagrees with.

And sure, the statement "not everyone can understand computer science" is technically true if you include people with mental disabilities. But in reality, some people draw the line a lot higher as a form of gatekeeping. I've known a number of professors who let themselves off the hook this way too: Poor student performance couldn't possibly be a failure of their teaching--the students must not be smart enough!

I've spent about 2.5 years teaching programming. Students really do seem to have some innate programming difficulty slider, which absolutely matters. Some of my students worked their absolute butts off to learn programming, and asked for help constantly (which I gave gladly). And they still barely scraped by.

Other students seem to learn programming extremely easily. I would show them something one day, and the next day they've already used what I showed them in their code.

I'm open to the hypothesis that its my fault that some of my students failed to learn programming. I certainly felt terrible for them when they worked really hard and still failed. But I don't think its all me. I certainly can't take equal credit for the students who did very well. My star students seemed like they barely needed me to teach them anything at all.

And for what its worth, the perspective that talent doesn't matter is an awful thing to teach struggling students if its wrong. Students hear that as "If I struggle at programming it must be my fault". I don't think it is. I think some people just have brains wired to make programming easier or harder to learn. There's no shame in encouraging some people to pick a different career. If programming really isn't right for someone, the sooner they swap to something else, the better.

I don't disagree with a lot of what you said. Practically speaking, some students are simply "behind" where they should be, at it might be too much effort to catch up, so the pragmatic choice is to pursue something else. I guess it's usually that I attribute their struggle more to external factors than internal factors.

* The student might have other stuff going on in their life at the time. Heavy course load, personal drama, etc..

* The student might have other interests, so they don't devote as much time to studying as they should.

* The student might not yet have had a good math education, so their abstract reasoning skills lag behind. I think it can still be learned, but someone in a college compsci course just doesn't have time to catch up.

I've been an undergrad/grad TA as well as a tutor for high school students in math/programming. My own experience tells me that learning is very "path-dependent". Students will be more receptive to my way of teaching if their background is similar to my own. Part of my job as a teacher is (was) to try to recognize the gaps in their background, but sometimes I do have a lot of trouble understanding what path a student took before coming to me, so it's harder for me to help them.

I was the one who appeared to learn it super fast. In retrospect, I had comparatively large amount of preexisting knowledge - my parents shown me very basics (in basic) before and we had some programming games.

And looking at my kids, this stuff matters a lot. A kid that comes in with complete zero experience has massive disadvantage against one with some experience.

This is very key. By the time I entered undergrad CS, the kids who had owned computers growing up, and played or even modded videogames, had a massive starting advantage over the ones who hadn't.

The entire first year of CS courses was mostly there to instill fundamental computer skills (not CS skills!) in the ones without that preexisting knowledge.

I haven't seen any data on video games helping with programming. But having a strong math background definitely seems to help. I don't think its knowledge - there's something about how you internally model a system that math teaches you. Approaching programming with the same mindset makes learning much easier.

I read a paper over a decade ago talking about this. They gave a survey to freshman students and looked for correlations with their end of semester marks. They found the students who assumed there was a consistent set of rules underpinning programming (even if they didn't know what those rules were) dramatically outperformed the students who thought the computer would "work it out somehow".

Video games definitely help develop overall computer literacy. The basic computer skills that are missing in folks who didn't grow up around computers are so foundational they might surprise you: - Filesystem basics, aka "where does a file go when you save it, and how do you find it again?". Do you know how many people just save everything to the documents folder, and scroll through the list of every file they've ever accessed every time? - Window management. I clicked on something, and now my document has disappeared. Help! - Drag-and-drop. Particularly on a laptop with a trackpad, this requires a fuckton of coordination.

Modding video games is real entry point. It is low key programming. But also how to edit files, filesystem, most importantly that you can and no one will yell at you. Basic computer literacy, simple administration are also something kids without free access to computer lacked.

This stuff is not taught here. You either know it or are seen as lost cause.

Even more importantly, I had those games that introduced you to loops, ifs, variables, programming in general.

I recall struggling in algebra as I didn’t follow the particular process that the teacher went through, while some friends seemed to readily follow this same teacher, and yet upon one on one discussion, I had no problem comprehending the same.

Thank you for the clarification. I understand your point now.

I teach math at a community college an I'm absolutely convinced not everyone can understand math. I'm not a great teacher and I think I'm not a terrible teacher. I've come to the following conclusion. For some people the effort required to learn the material given their natural ability is so high that they'll never get it. They won't be able to put in the effort required.

I could be wrong though and might be one of the people who let themselves off the hook as you mentioned.

> None of us are special for working in tech

Computer occupations as a whole have a median intelligence at least 1stddev in excess of the population median. https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2002-hauser.pdf I have to imagine that programmers in particular are even higher.

I've always felt like a good data point in favor of IQ playing a non-trivial role in suitability for programming is the fact that anti-credentialist moves like 10-week coding bootcamps have been so incredibly successful.

Bootcamps took off shortly after I graduated from my top-ranked CS program, and I remember being extremely dismissive of their value: there was no way that you could fit the four years of my CS degree into ten weeks. I've since realized that being good at Computer Science grossly overqualifies you for many programming jobs, and that bootcamps do a great job of giving reasonably smart people an on-ramp to these jobs. I know three separate people who jumpstarted six-figure careers from scratch after attending a bootcamp: one was a waitress, one an artist, and one's entire career thus far consisted of a decade of changing tires at Costco. One of the three wasn't college-educated, and two were first-generation Mexican immigrants (as children) from working-class families, belying the assumption that privilege and educational access fully explains programming ability. Unsurprisingly, all three are fairly intelligent people.

I can't think of another industry that has a similarly egalitarian entry path, and I think a very plausible explanation is that suitability for these types of entry-level programming jobs is little more than a test for high IQ (relative to the population norm).

This is my experience as well. During an ill-advised foray into building the tech org for a mediocre startup with a poor candidate pipeline, the quality of candidates we got was so poor and the work we were hiring for so easy that I pretty immediately found myself dropping every requirement except for knowledge of basic programming + intelligence. This worked pretty well: The no-experience, very-smart guy that I strongly recommended hiring became the capable workhorse of the eng team, and the dumb guy with a decade of experience that the founders hired over my objection was an absolute dumpster fire, unable to work with any autonomy and bounced from area to area in an effort to find a place where he would do the least damage.

You do indeed get very smart people doing menial work, and their talents are largely wasted.

IQ has always been a good indicator of programming skill. Unfortunately school grades and specialisation aren't a good indicator of IQ, and (I think?) it's illegal in the US to require job candidates to take IQ tests.

So the issue for companies is that without the usual whiteboarding or educational paper trail you have to find a way to identify high IQ people without being too obvious about it.

The other issue is if you find no-experience very-smart people you have to spend time training them before they start being productive. This works if you're not in a hurry, but it's harder to justify when runway is limited.

> it's illegal in the US to require job candidates to take IQ tests.

> So the issue for companies is that without the usual whiteboarding or educational paper trail you have to find a way to identify high IQ people without being too obvious about it.

Yup. I was surprised to find myself gravitating to this through trial-and-error, since I had pretty thoroughly absorbed my affluent coastal background's bullshit religious conviction in the pure blank slate of every human mind and the uselessness of intelligence as a distinct concept.

> The other issue is if you find no-experience very-smart people you have to spend time training them before they start being productive. This works if you're not in a hurry, but it's harder to justify when runway is limited.

Right, the other ingredient that I mentioned was that the engineering work we needed didn't require any specific skills. The vast majority of our engineering work was just a Python backend, which is about as "pure" an exercise of manipulating logic as you get in engineering.

<<I've since realized that being good at Computer Science grossly overqualifies you for many programming jobs>>

Thank you. What a naked and honest thing to say on HackerNews. My brother is so much smarter than me. I went the CompSci route and suffered (toiled!) for years at a university. His boot camp was less than three months and he landed a just fine job. Internally, I was incredibly dismissive of his boot camp, but was proven wrong (again!) by my own horrible elitism.

No everyone needs to be working on cutting edge ML/AI. My brother makes websites for shopping. (Yay.) His income easily doubled after a year of cutting his teeth.

I experienced this from the other direction, joining Google and assuming the work would be stimulating because it's The Best Smart-Person Job (at least at the time). I didn't have a lot of good mentorship, so it took me years of wrong turns until I found myself where I am today, finally feeling like my career doing Applied CS Research is a good fit for me.

>> I don’t think everyone can understand $RANDOM_DISCIPLINE.

> This is a bold claim.

I disagree. What makes computer science so special that it can be understood by everyone, while it is generally accepted that other disciplines cannot?

After all, saying "Not everyone can understand chemistry" doesn't draw the same ire.

The bar for getting stuff done with programming is much lower than the bar for chemistry. While I do agree that not everyone can or will be a full time software engineer, I think that most people can incorporate programming into some aspect of their lives. Whether they want to is another thing but that shouldn't stop us from teaching at least the basics even if it means the most they'll do is write conditional excel sheets or figure out how to build their own iPhone shortcuts.

I suspect many people on HN have an unrealistic view of how most of the population operates.

People who can do any version of STEM with some minimal basic competence are unusual. They're not exceptionally unusual, but they're certainly not the population median.

Media numeracy is around Level 3 on this list. Numeracy in the US is lower than the OECD median and is somewhere between Levels 2 and 3.

https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/about/what-numeracy/what...

I'd estimate you need Level 4 for programming to make any sense at all and maybe get you started with very simple programming tasks, Level 5 to be able to do basic code construction on a daily basis, and Level 6 to be a competent senior with some useful modelling skills.

Level 5 is maybe 20-25% of the population. Level 6 is probably less than 10%.

A very unrealistic view of the programming and mathematical abilities of the average person, even the average college educated, employed, under 40 person, is the main source of contention I find whenever this argument comes up in my social circles as well.

Those who think anyone can learn programming should pick an acquaintance ages 25-45 who has sufficient time, and attempt to teach them to program, and see the results. Or inquire about the actual success rates of coding bootcamps (which are already self selected groups and have filters themselves, far from the average population to begin with).

I've done the above with very mixed results, it's pretty clear that for a litany of reasons the average person is functionally incapable of being a useful programmer. I don't see the average citizen coding a lot in the next few decades, even casually.

Why do you believe that "not everyone can understand chemistry"?

Perhaps I should be a little more specific. When I say "everyone" below, I mean "the overwhelming majority of people in the average range of human intelligence, without debilitating mental deficiencies". This group spans virtually everyone you are likely to encounter, from car mechanics to school teachers, to postal workers, to professional software engineers.

People have blind spots, but in general they're pretty smart when it comes to the things they think about every day. I believe:

* Everyone has the mental capacity to learn $RANDOM_DISCIPLINE if they put in the time and effort. A good teacher can dramatically accelerate the process, while a bad teacher can bring the process to a grinding halt.

* Everyone has a limit to how well they can understand $RANDOM_DISCIPLINE, (even Terrence Tao) but most careers do not demand that workers reach that limit. One can be a successful researcher without performing at the same level as Terrence Tao. One can be a successful software engineer without being a computer science researcher. One can understand advanced topics in math or computer science or chemistry without having personally discovered them. One can work as a chemistry lab technician, or a high-school chemistry teacher without winning a Nobel prize.

You can replace $RANDOM_DISCIPLINE with things like "computer science", "constitutional law", "how to reassemble a car", "chemistry", etc.. If you start getting very specific, you might be able to get me to disagree with statements like "Not everybody has the mental capacity to have invented Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory".

> Why do you believe that "not everyone can understand chemistry"?

At least 5% of the population can’t understand algebra. If you can’t do algebra then you might be able to follow recipes but you can’t do chemistry. Without algebra you can’t do stochiometry and that’s essential for even high school level chemistry.

Sorry, by "can" I mean "has the mental capacity to". I agree with the statement "not everyone has the knowledge they need to understand chemistry right now". I disagree with "not everyone has the mental capacity to understand chemistry". Note also my definition of "everyone". I certainly think everyone has the mental capacity to understand algebra.

> I certainly think everyone has the mental capacity to understand algebra.

I invite you to tutor some middle school students then. For values of algebra that include “can be taught to draw the appropriate line given the corresponding equation” there are plenty who can’t understand algebra.

I don’t know about middle school kids, mine’s not there yet, he’s 9 - but he’s already done algebra, including simultaneous linear equations with multiple unknowns.

No powers, quadratic equation or differentiation and the like yet, but I can see the QE coming up in next years books (which we recently bought since 3rd grade just finished)

I’m pretty sure that when I was at school, this was a “senior school” (age 11-16) topic, and I was maybe 12 or 13. Kids are learning stuff earlier than they used to, at least it feels that way to me.

Oh, you can teach some six year olds algebra. It’s not impossibly hard. Some children are ready at a very young age. But some people you can teach it for a semester and every shaky grasp of the subject they got in four months will disappear completely in two weeks. Some people cannot do abstraction.

> At least 5% of the population can’t understand algebra.

That's a very low bar, though. It would mean that 95% (ok, maybe slightly less) of everyone out there would be able to understand chemistry.

That algebra is necessary for chemistry does not imply that it is sufficient.

Can't or don't?

I think there is a huge difference between currently being unable to understand something and being unable to understand something indefinitly (e.g. because you have mental deficiency that blocks you from forming the necessary pictures in your mind).

Having thought math to mentally challenged kids, I had only one kid where I would really say he could not learn algebra at that point of his life. Mainly because he had a memory span of 10 minutes and severe developmental issues.

All the other kids where really bad at math, but given the right effort I could really improve things by just working on their stuff for 1 hour a day.

I know many tech guys like to see themselves as some kind of elite that has a secret knowledge very few others can master. But in my eyes that is just a failure of an education system.

As for kids, I agree with you that the majority of them can potentially be good at almost every field. But as for adults, I’m not so sure. Most of us become way too rigid as we age, learning capability and more importantly motivation becomes way lowered. So someone who had trouble with basic algebra (at the time mostly due to a bad teacher/experience with math) will not generally be able to overcome his/her identity of “being bad at math”. Of course, there are exceptions.

The majority of us can improve in any area. Some brains are hard wired for programming others for say music.

A programmer can make a song. A musician can make a program. I'm sure you could train those kids to sing as well. I'm sure you could train those kids to play basketball.

You wouldn't be able to train them enough to make any professional league.

Programming is genetic. Recently I met my birthparents and I discovered the whole family are programmers. I thought I came up with the idea myself I pushed myself through school. No one in my highschool did programming or elemetry school. I thought I determined my own choices.. I was proud of the unique path.. then I met the birthparents and realized how predetermined everything is.

I do think it is more about the way you explain something than about the actual topic. You can explain the same topic in such a way that it works for people who can visualize things, for people who like abstract concepts, for people where it is about social relationships etc.

Good educators will always target multiple of those patterns. Bad educators always target the same pattern and will therefore only have auccess with the same kind of person.

I am currently teaching electronics and programming to artists who quite uniformly hated math and physics in school, and it kinda works. You just cannot teach it in the way they would teach it to a STEM student.

> Why do you believe that "not everyone can understand chemistry"?

I didn't say that I did. My belief is irrelevant anyway, because it is generally accepted when someone says "not everyone can understand chemistry".

I was pointing out that saying such a thing only draws ire if you say it about CS.

> When I say "everyone" below, I mean "the overwhelming majority of people in the average range of human intelligence, without debilitating mental deficiencies". This group spans virtually everyone you are likely to encounter, from car mechanics to school teachers, to postal workers, to professional software engineers.

And yet there is no controversy if postal workers, car mechanics and hairdressers say that they are not able to understand chemistry. There is only controversy for CS.

I feel that you would do well to explain why only CS is controversial, while chemistry, auto mechanic and art is never controversial in regard to this particular assertion.

I guess I disagree with your premise then? In my experience someone who is likely to think that anyone can learn CS is likely to also think that anyone can learn art, car repair, or chemistry. On the flip side there are plenty of people who believe that people are born "chemistry people" or "math people" or "art people" etc.. I've not witnessed anyone say that CS is accessible but chemistry is not.

> I guess I disagree with your premise then? In my experience someone who is likely to think that anyone can learn CS is likely to also think that anyone can learn art, car repair, or chemistry.

That isn't my premise. My premise is that saying such a thing isn't a bold claim, it's a commonly accepted claim.

When you said "This is a bold claim", I replied with "I disagree", because "Some people just aren't any good at $DISCIPLINE" isn't a bold claim.

> * Why do you believe that "not everyone can understand chemistry"?*

I am a physical embodiment of a person who can not understand chemistry. Basics hell yes, organic chemistry for most parts yes, process chemistry ... iffily, but when it comes to physical chemistry, I'm hopeless. And I tried. Over many years. I changed my major in university from chemical engineering to CS because my head simply would not work the way you need it to work in physical chemistry.

On the upside, I think there are surprising parallels that have made my recent life (~15 years) easier because of the lessons I picked up from chemical engineering. Conflicting feedback loops, S-curves and equilibrium states are not that different from the concepts and safeguards you encounter in distributed systems.

> Everyone has the mental capacity to learn $RANDOM_DISCIPLINE if they put in the time and effort.

I know that this feels like something that should be true in an ideal, just world or in the HN-reading bubble, but I've never agreed with this. I know people who are incredibly smart, I know average people who are not very intelligent, but are fairly knowledgeable, I know rather simple people who live simple lives, and I know people who are, bluntly said, absolutely fucking stupid.

I am absolutely sure that I know people who wouldn't be able to get from zero to doing my job exactly the way I do it (and I'm certainly no rockstar programmer, I'm like in the bottom 10 % here) in any reasonable timespan, like 20 years even. I would literally bet any amount of money on it.

I really want to be as optimistic as you are, but I can attest from personal experience, not about chemistry, but about math - not everyone can understand basic mathematics.

I often tried helping friends and classmates, in one-on-one sessions, to understand basic (primary and/or high school) math. Sometimes, you just end giving up. This was after trying a number of different approaches, different learning techniques, different ways of understanding / visualising abstract concepts, etc.

Not everyone can understand abstract concepts (or our teaching methods are too primitive).

I teach programming (not CS) part time. All students have been doing reasonably well and took something valuable with them, which is the intent of the course.

However only a few have what it takes to regularly sit in front of a computer and power through long term. It’s definitely special for better or worse. Let’s face it: We’re nerds!

It's a bold claim, but it's been largely proven by the famous "The Camel Has Two Humps" article that one basic prereq for learning CS/programming effectively is understanding that one is dealing with a formal system that's following consistent rules, even if it's not always clear what these rules might be. It seems to be quite hard to teach this understanding precisely to those who haven't internalized it, but it's a key part of the tacit knowledge one would need to work in the field.

The author of "The Camel Has Two Humps" has retracted it. https://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have...

"That document was very misleading and, in the way of web documents, it continues to mislead to this day. I need to make an explicit retraction of what it claimed. Dehnadi didn’t discover a programming aptitude test. He didn’t ﬁnd a way of dividing programming sheep from non-programming goats. We hadn’t shown that nature trumps nurture. Just a phenomenon and a prediction."

That's too bad, then. A good paper should not be retracted simply because of so many misinterpreting what it's talking about and creating some pointless controversy about it. The underlying "phenomenon and prediction" (namely, the bimodal distribution of proficiency in basic CS) stands up to scrutiny.

I dislike the way that so many people have a burning desire to belittle the difficulty of what we do. The fact of the matter is that most people cannot do it, and pretending otherwise is not helpful.

> “Programming fundamentals” isn’t the same from language to language. It’s inconceivable that a student who learned to program with python would develop the same type of fundamental understanding as a student who used C (to develop an understanding of memory-level APIs) or Haskell (to develop an understanding of type and semantic theories).

I think this is a pretty good point and it touches upon something I was thinking about: what language you use to introduce students to computer science says a lot (not everything!) about your pedagogical attitude towards what "computer science" is. If you think that it's fundamentally about humans interacting with machines, then low level languages make sense. If you think it's fundamentally about math, then functional languages make sense. If you think it's about building things which provide a lot of real-world value, then something like Python makes sense. Now of course (1) students probably need to learn about all three at some point; and (2) there are a number of other factors here, perhaps most importantly making the material enjoyable, approachable, and rewarding for students such that they'll want to delve into each of these aspects.

What inspired me to learn programming was your last point: building things. That's why I think that people should be introduced to a loosely typed, high-level, forgivable language. Compiler errors and verbose code does not appeal at first glance, you need to draw people in..

I will never forget the moment 11 year old me saw a message box appear with text that I specified. I made that happen, I built it. I felt so powerful and cool. That 1 line of code in an obscure language got me hooked and over time I moved on to other languages.

This is why I recommend using Processing and the free book Nature of Code to learn the basics.

People see what they do and have instant visual feedback.

Most programmers are not computer scientists. Even most people with computer science degrees are not computer scientists at heart, they forced themselves to do the coursework so they could get a job (mostly web, utilizing almost nothing they were taught).

I learned to program as a child (I taught myself, for fun!) but I didn't learn much computer science until well into adulthood.

As someone who fought hard to switch careers into this industry and teaches software engineering now I understand the impulse to think this but I have to say all my experience thus far contradicts it.

Which part(s)?

Possibly replying to someone else.

Why does web dev not use much formal cs in your opinion?

This is an interesting question. From personal experience, I have also found simple GUI work to the "digging ditches" work of programmers. (Weirdly, I still love it, because it makes it easy for end-users to understand your tools!) Of course, complex GUIs are another beast, but usually GUI programming on the low end as it is very hard to test (easily) and requires endless tweaks due to the high configurability of GUIs.

For example, if you just look at GUIs created using Excel/VBA, you will find they seem to need endless tweaking to work just right (edge cases?), but do not at all require a formal CS degree. (I have worked with many non-CS people who are fine a mid-level Excel/VBA stuff.)

Expanding on this a bit...

You could think of there being a universe U of programming fundamentals. Each language uses a subset of U as the language's fundamentals (no language uses all of it), and each language uses a different subset.

Some languages have subsets that overlap, but that isn't always obvious, because they clothe the same thing in different syntax and, sometimes, different semantics. Even when the semantics are the same, they talk about the semantics using different terms.

So the problems with transferring knowledge of the fundamentals from one language to another are that they aren't the same fundamentals (different subsets of U), and that they are expressed in different terms and in different syntax. That can make it hard to recognize that the parts that are in common actually are the same. And then there's the new parts.

Now here's a class in C#. One student comes in knowing Haskell; one comes in knowing Python; and one comes in knowing C. The "fundamentals to transfer" differ from student to student. It's asking a lot for the teacher to be able to help each student recognize what part of their background transfers, what part of C# it transfers to, and what the deeper fundamentals are that are expressed in both languages. An exceptional teacher could certainly do so, but as the adjective implies, such teachers are the exception.

But it's not really fair to blame the student, either. It's asking a lot of a 19-year-old to understand deeply enough to make those connections.

My own guess is that this happens best after working as a professional for several years, and in more than one language. Then it's somewhat easier to see what's going on "under the hood" of the languages.

I think you’re vastly overestimating programming fundamentals.

Every language can do some form of if then else be it machine code with goto’s or purely functional. Ask someone to find the absolute value of a number and they should be able to quickly figure out something that works in a new language. The basics of programming are not about being correct so much as not being lost.

> Every language can do some form of if then else

Uh, not exactly. I had a really hard time learning prolog because it doesn't really have if-then-else. Haskell is missing the idea of something happening after something else. Stack languages don't have variables. And so on - there's a lot more to programming than python.

There's a big class of popular structured / OO languages which are quite similar (C, JS, Python, Java, etc). But they certainly aren't "every language". Not by a long shot.

And even amongst those languages there's huge variety in how the grain of the languages shape the code we write. I was talking to a grizzled old programmer at a conference a few years ago about the performance of java vs C. He said in some benchmarks he did the performance was almost identical. I got him to show me his code - and sure enough, he wrote java as if it were C. He was using native java arrays everywhere and basically everything was a primitive variable, in huge classes acting more as buckets for code than anything else. His code was unrecognisable as java because he was still writing C, just with a different syntax.

> The basics of programming are not about being correct so much as not being lost.

The basis of programming is expression. The most idiomatic way to express yourself in each language is very different. Its as much cultural as it is syntactic.

Just a nitpick, but this is false

> Haskell is missing the idea of something happening after something else

A Monad is implicitly a monoid, which certainly does specify an ordering. And as for expressions, the order of evaluation of arguments is not specified either by C for example.

The bigger problem is that "something happening after something else" is not related to the idea of an if-then-else.

In Common Lisp the if-then-else construct is IF. The "something happening after something else" construct is PROGN. The whole point of if-then-else is that only one thing happens; "something happening after something else" requires a minimum of two things.

I don't really get your point. If/else expressions are in principle free to evaluate both branches, but that would be needless. But when we provide an IO Monad for example, if/else expressions will not suffice in the naive way -- you have to use the monad "bind" operation to actually provide an order -- what it boils down to basically: the A; B; C; in imperative languages become C(B(A())) in pure FP ones -- with implicit ordering.

> If/else expressions are in principle free to evaluate both branches, but that would be needless.

This is true only in a pure functional language; if you admit the existence of side effects, then it is a crucial part of an if statement that the code associated with the other branch is never executed.

My point is just that it makes no sense to say "some languages have no form of if statement; for example, Haskell doesn't have the concept of one thing happening after something else". That example is untrue. But if it were true, it still would not interfere with Haskell's ability to have an if statement. Thus, defending Haskell's ability to run one statement after another statement is unnecessary to refute the claim; the claim never worked in the first place.

Haskell very much has an if then else equivalent.

  if' :: Bool -> a -> a -> a
  if' True  x _ = x
  if' False _ y = y

https://wiki.haskell.org/If-then-else

Also, Java was designed to handle performance critical code like that. That’s why people call it a fast language, you can write non performance critical code however you want, but optimize for speed and it’s going to look like C.

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I see that construction as the equivalent of the ternary operator. Its not the if-else construct you find in imperative languages. The claim was "Every language can do some form of if then else" - which I read to imply that every language is semantically familiar to someone who knows python / C / java. Haskell's approach is certainly not familiar if you've only ever written javascript or something.

> Also, Java was designed to handle performance critical code like that. That’s why people call it a fast language

Sure; but my point is that idiomatic java looks quite different from idiomatic C. If your first language is C, its easy to write java that looks like C. If your first language is java, you can torture C into looking like a bad version of java. But both approaches are newbie mistakes. Learning a language involves a lot more than just being able to make programs that work at all. Its also learning a culture, and learning to make code that fits well with the existing ecosystem. You won't get very far in the java programming community if you don't know how to write java in the popular style.

Thats why they say learning your second language is difficult. You need to unlearn some of how you approach programming so you can come at your second language with fresh eyes.

Doing better is irrelevant when we are talking about what constitutes the basics of programming. You can always improve your personal skills, but the basics are in effect the smallest set of skills that works.

“The smallest set that works” in the real world requires that you can write code that others can read, write code that could pass a PR. And that you can read the code that others write.

If you only know enough Java to be able to translate awkwardly from C, you aren’t fluent in Java. I know bits and pieces of Haskell - probably enough to make working programs. But I’m not fluent in Haskell. I can’t read the code others write. I can’t think in Haskell. And that’s not enough.

This is talking about students. Writing code that works and others can read is roughly the benchmark for operating at the professional level. It’s not enough to get a job at FAANG, but many company’s have lower standards.

“Professional” is not what most people mean when they talk about the basics as say a welder, cook, etc.

Having learned C++ and Python, I feel they're similar in programming model (imperative, object-oriented). My limited experience with application or kernel C code feels like C++ but with high-level constructs replaced with pointer juggling that makes me feel uneasy (C has a culture of not using vocabulary types to communicate nullability and responsibility for deallocating). Haskell (barely know) is an altogether unfamiliar programming model, being based on pure functions instead of mutation, but the underlying model beneath the abstractions (thunks) leak through.

Maybe not everyone, but definitly a majority. I'm not talking about learning assembly language, but learning some HTML/CSS/Javascript (if properly taught) seems pretty simple to me. With enough effort and youth (ie malleable brain).

It's crazy that programmers think this to me and just a form of ingrained tribalism that tells them that what they do is somehow special. Probably because they get such crazy time-valuations in terms of salary. But that's just a supply and demand curve.

> “Programming fundamentals” isn’t the same from language to language.

You should be able to carry very, very basic concepts over to other languages with much less difficulty than learning them the first time. A student sufficiently skilled in Python will be able to make the same intro level programs in C given enough time. Badly? Yes, but they'll function.

Similarly, a watercolor artist won't forget the basics of art when handed a pencil.

“… sufficiently skilled […] given enough time …”

Well, sure. For some values of sufficiently and enough.

Sufficiently skilled: understands the topic in their chosen language.

Enough time: however long it takes them to learn the syntax of the second language + the time it took to complete the project in the first language.

Unfortunately I can't give decimal precision hour estimates.

Learning the syntax of a language is far from understanding the sementics.

C and Python are also languages with a pretty direct historical relationship. Going from, say, Python to Prolog, it will be significantly more challenging to identify commonalities.

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