Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

This thread is also a good read: https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1522633160483385345

Shows that a lot of people, ESPECIALLY programmers, vastly overestimate the competence of the average person when it comes to whatever they are an expert at. You may think that this person is silly - but that is tainted by your past experience of already knowing it warping what you think the baseline average knowledge level is at. And this issue would have never been solved for normal people - the only reason this barrier was ever breached for this person was due to their large twitter following. Most people don't have that luxury.

So, if you think it's hard for someone who is already a programmer - think about how needlessly complicated the entire ecosystem and everything surrounding it is for the average person. It's no wonder many people basically view anything past the surface level of computers as dark magic, and we call people good with these magical devices "wizards".

View on HN

Was going to edit this in but it quickly turned into a related rant about the state of things: if you don't want that, scroll past.

The real problem is that there's no more room for the technological "middle class". We've gotten to the point where you cannot be SLIGHTLY interested in computers, want to make a quick app for yourself, or make something small to share with the world. You either have to have no interest at all (and live in blissful ignorance) or be so into this type of stuff that you might as well just make it a career. In between these two extremes lies a valley of frustration and needless complexity, where everything is always breaking and changing because we found out what was used 2 years ago is actually bad but THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT! because now we found a solution that is totally going to work forever this time. It's exhausting to even think about.

Many people got their start programming with something like messing with simple Visual Basic stuff. I, and I'm sure many others who are reading this, started with a TI-83 and a desire to cheat on my math quiz. I know that I'm going a little off the rails here, and this has become more of a rant than anything meaningful, but I really, really hate how there's quickly becoming no space for that sort of thing - nowhere for people formerly uninterested in technology and programming to get their feet wet, nowhere to make a quick application to accomplish a small task, etc..

I've been programming on the web since 1997. All the techniques developed since then still work. I still have a couple of "web 2.0" websites I've developed running at work... because while I nominally have all the language skills, I only dip my toes into the chaotic world of "the latest JS best practices" a few times over the years and have not been able to justify the effort of keeping up when it is changing at a higher frequency than I have needs. If someone drops me into a functioning project I can adapt quickly, but starting from scratch has become virtually impossible in any reasonable period of time anymore.

This really only hurts with UI stuff. Other JS I can write just fine; pure Javascript in the browser has gotten pretty powerful, it all but has jQuery built in now, you've got XPath, a templating language (simplistic, and needs a bit of XSS care, but adequate for small needs) and a lot of other useful things all just sitting there, but if you want a big widget setup there's a huge learning curve to get there, even for an expert programmer.

For the novice, "classic web" would still be a very powerful thing to learn that isn't too hard, but it's hard to find those references now underneath the pile of not quite functional tutorials, broken install instructions, entirely different languages creeping in (Typescript), etc. It's a total disaster for someone trying to learn this way.

This just isn't true, though.

I have quite a few non-technical colleagues who know just enough Python to Get Shit Done.

My father (a writer) taught himself R for research purposes and is productive with it.

Universal Paperclips has a super-basic JavaScript codebase[0] but was a really popular game.

Thing is, if you search "how to do X in Python" you're going to get a bunch of resources aimed at professionals because they're the ones looking for that stuff most of the time. That doesn't mean the resources are prohibitively complex, they're just for people solving a different problem.

[0] https://github.com/jgmize/paperclips/tree/master/docs

Oooooh did you just call Frank Lantz super-basic kek

I think he's a good contrast to the "great computer scientist, but not a JS person" in the linked article.

He initially built Universal Paperclips to learn JavaScript. It's a cool thing, a lot of people played it, and it doesn't rely on an incomprehensible ecosystem. It's two HTML files, four scripts, two CSS files, and an image.

You don't _need_ all the stuff people complain about to do cool things with JavaScript. Especially if you're just getting started with the language.

I agree. You just need to actually be a good designer :) When you have a fun and clear vision for what you want to build, it's hugely motivating and you're way more likely to finish

But are they building software tools that are useful and stable enough to distribute? That's the level of capability he is talking about.

That's not what the linked Twitter thread is talking about, nor is it how I interpret "make a quick app for yourself, or make something small to share with the world" or "make a quick application to accomplish a small task." Those things are eminently achievable without having to embrace the level of complexity that's so popular in professional software development.

And I actually think the level of capability you're talking about is within closer reach than most people realize. Certainly it's much easier now than it was even 10 years ago. Probably not something that a non-programmer can accomplish on day 1, but I'm not sure there's many crafts that can be learned that quickly.

By "distribute," I didn't mean as a commercial product. I meant just sharing with other people. There is a huge difference between being able to tinker with Python/R and being able to make a package usable by strangers.

The onramp from

- script without a main function

- to personal or ad hoc codebase for non-tech workplace

- to packaged code to cope with namespaces + type hints + general best practices

- to code that reads like good code from the major open source project

is long, but the slope is easy. There are no discontinuities. Basically anyone who can use Python to glue together networkx/sklearn etc. can eventually write software tools that are useful and stable enough to distribute.

That should not be the litmus test for writing software. Lots of software can have 1 user, yourself. Stability and ability to distribute be damned

If we have a middle class in tech, we also have the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" pretending to be the top claiming everyone below them isn't good enough for something as simple as creating a few endpoints and vibechecking rather than checking skills.

And this extends all the way to the job market, where you now need 3 years of experience for a skill most people know how to use in about a week tops, and only lack the exposure of that skill used in a corporate setting. Where people will parrot "you need 3 months to not be a liability! (or more)" when those individuals will easily earn themselves back in the same timeframe. For projects where all you really do is create endpoints, process the most basic of information and expose it in certain ways. For reference, most people in STEM majors need to learn more difficult stuff in a shorter timeframe, with less help.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with our delivery manager and two other developers from another team, who had a wildly different than me assessment of a recent candidate.

Their argument was that he didn't know this and that and how is it that I deemed him worthy?

I interjected by saying that during these 30min I get to ask questions I don't have nearly the time to check one's skills throughly. And the same is true for them.

The most I can achieve in this timeframe is check whether the person won't be actively harmful to the project by e.g. being a charlatan or just malicious.

This was news to the delivery manager and they didn't approve of that.

I refrained from replying that our rates vs the market don't really put us in a position to be picky.

But I did tell them that I worked with "net negative" people(with examples) and it's really not about the skills at the moment of hiring.

I'd like to see more of this.

It astounds me that software dev, historically seen as a field with and for "poor communicators", somehow believes its interviewers can do what top psychologists consider almost impossible to do. Same happens across almost every industry, but really, tech? "Cold hard logic" tech somehow became "yeah we can totally psychoanalyze someone in 30 minutes by talking"?

Worse, the lack of structure across the entirety makes it more of a lottery and a guessing game which is more or less sold as one's personal (in)capabilities. It's far more harmful than people make it out to be.

Or perhaps the interviewers are under-experienced, under-perpared and/or under-trained?

True story: I had an interview a couple of weeks ago. I was interviewed by two people who were younger than me, and relatively less experienced than me.

My CV has a number of links to repos for various side projects and such. Best I could tell, neither of them looked, at least not more than a minute. Not a single "Your ____ repo looks ____ let's discuss a bit..." Instead I got ovetly basic questions, some of which didn't map to the role / opportunity.

Furthermore, I could only find one of them on GitHub and it was routine stuff (e.g., wedding website). Apparently, neither understood I was interviewing them as well.

I'll never get that hour of my life back.

I have a phrase:

"How you hire is who you hire."

It's sadly funny how many outfits still don't get that.

My theory: most hiring absolutely doesn't matter (from the interviewer's side).

Most people will either have the skills needed or the capability to learn said skills. Weeding out obvious poor cases is easy, the remainder is semi-arbitrary weeding out of true positives in hopes of weeding potential false positives. Much of higher education alone does a good job at pushing people to learn difficult things in a short timeframe, with little incentive beyond "getting that paper".

Also, hiring is a lot like parenting, but the bad aspects magnified at least a few times. As you say, barely anyone knows what to do. No one has experience. Almost everyone claims to be an expert (not verbally, but they do act like it). Non-obvious bad choices often go undiscovered; as above, most picks themselves aren't bad (they just aren't great), or something else is blamed instead. Pride, neuroticism and personal bias play huge parts in the decisions.

Worst of all, no one actually reads the studies showcasing most of what hiring managers do have close to zero correlation to anything. I'm really just waiting for a mass study where two companies do an initial vetting, then company A throws darts at a dartboard and company B does the whole job interview shtick, and compare the results 2 years down the line. And maybe add a company C which actually does what studies suggest.

Agreed. But now we're back to:

"How you hire is who you hire."

And I have a new one...

"You're not only the interviewer, you're an interviewee as well."

Understanding these two basic are essential to a decent hiring process. Ignore these and you're just another fool in a sea of fools.

> Best I could tell, neither of them looked, at least not more than a minute.

I once interviewed a guy with a nice, short 1-pager résumé—not from lack of experience, just a solid, terse document. Not just out of school. Had three or four tech jobs in his history.

He listed one research paper near the bottom, that he'd co-authored in grad school.

I found the paper, skimmed it, and asked him about it in the interview (a lot of times in interviews I just ask candidates about stuff that it seems like they'd know about, that I don't know about, to satisfy my curiosity—I have no idea whether this is good or bad interviewing technique, but my intuition is having someone teach you about something you don't know, that they do, is probably at least as good as asking them to tell you stuff you already know) and he told me I was the only interviewer who'd ever brought it up at all.

My resume is quite similar. On the bottom, I have a link to something that I'm quite proud of under a small heading titled, "Ask me about it!" I've been interviewing passively / casually for the last 18 months. I've spoke to a couple dozen different organizations in that time. I've had exactly 1 person ask me about it. I've thought about removing it from my resume with the thought that maybe people are just put off by it.

Put off? Or lazy? At the end of the day the relationship comes down to "fit". Time and signals are very limited. A bad decision by either party is costly in a number of ways. You threw them a softball and they...couldn't be bothered?

Moi? I'd leave it. Them not looking tells as much as if they do.

I think it's a good approach. My position is: we're considering a possible long term relationship. We both have an interest in this meeting. That is, I hold as many cards as you do.

Those that see it otherwise? That to me a culture red flag. It's an easy swipe left.

I've found that unfortunately it's most often people at the peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect who volunteer to do interviews, so hiring decisions are ultimately made in part by those who vastly overestimate the scale of insight they can get from those relatively short conversations.

I had people get visibly angry during interviews where I was the candidate when I called them out on giving me a problem to solve, that they obviously had in their project and spent weeks on figuring out, while I was somehow supposed to do that in less than an hour.

Oddly specific interview questions are a red flag to me, because they indicate someone had a strong opinion on what's the "proper" way to solve a given problem.

I've gone through this before. The end result was that I was quite literally dis-invited from interviewing candidates. I left that place shortly thereafter.

I've started programming around 10 year ago without any Visual Basic code. There are so many more resources nowadays to get started programming, back in the day there was no way in hell you'd get something like repl.it where you don't even need to install anything.

What stops you from creating the most simple html page and playing with CSS? That counts as programming to me, there's also scratch for people who are completely new and want to learn.

A big issue is that 10 or 20 years ago the steps for creating a webpage were simple: just open notepad (or whatever) and put some HTML.

Today you "gotta" install node, yarn, webpack, react. Then you gotta make a package.json and configure webpack. Or replace webpack with something called "crap". At least that's what all the "for beginners" tutorials that everyone recommends says! Nobody ever said I could just use notepad!!!

But that's not exclusive for frontend.

20 years ago you'd get a random server with Perl. Probably free. 10 years ago you'd get a random server with PHP. You would use FTP and notepad to learn the ropes.

Today you must install some advanced editing software with some plugins, use a terminal, install some runtime or compiler, get some packages, which won't work, so Google tells you to use "sudo" so it works, but that's very suspicious. Stack Overflow says shouldn't be "sudoing" by the way, this is dangerous, you should actually install this "version manager" thing here to install the first tool you installed, so maybe uninstall the first tool, although there's no uninstaller. Oh, and you need this "package manager" tool that install the version manager in the first place. Then you gotta learn to deploy. At this point you're already too old for this shit.

Desktop apps? Good luck with that.

OF COURSE there are simpler solutions, like just making a website with HTML as you could before, or Jupiter Notebooks. But few people today will stumble on that by accident.

You can still do a webpage just like you did 20 years ago, inserting a couple HTML tags in a notepad.

Now the scope of what a webpage is capable of is infinitaly larger, and so is the complexity required for using all the new possibilities. If you want to use advanced stuff without learning the basics, than of course you're going to have a bad time.

3rd party JS code used to be snippets you were expected to copy-paste into your own code, or whole files you were expected to save and then load with a <script> tag before your own code.

Now there are like 50 ways to import JS code, most of them don't work most places, a lot of the code itself won't work in a browser at all (node-only), and a great deal of it is a pain to get into a browser if you're not fully bought into Node and probably also serving the whole "app" from Node.

It's about as easy to write your own JS in a browser, now, but it's vastly harder to start using code from the overall JS ecosystem.

> You can still do a webpage just like you did 20 years ago, inserting a couple HTML tags in a notepad.

Yes, I agree. That's exactly what I said in several parts of my message. However I believe you missed the point and didn't notice the sarcastic tone.

Perhaps expecting readers of a message board to pick-up on your sarcastic tone is not going to be an effective way to communicate your point.

I believe I did fine conveying it. The last paragraph makes it pretty clear I know there are other solutions. The problem with the reply wan't the sarcasm, but not reading the whole message.

Not to be an ass, but playing with css and html isn't programming. At all. It's making web pages. The web is so universal today that many people conflate "making web pages" and "programming". And there's nothing really wrong with that _if your goal is to learn to make web pages,_ but I'm pretty sure there are still more than a few people out there who want to solve problems with code, or just learn to code, with little or no interest in the web. Telling them to start with html + css is kind of like telling an aspiring painter that it's easy to start making sketches with a pencil and paper.

>Not to be an ass, but playing with css and html isn't programming. At all. It's making web pages.

... except you can literally make desktop and mobile applications now by "playing with css and html"! ^electron -- shudder!^

Part of the reason for the JS mess (which people have been bitching about for years and years) is how easy it is to dip your toes into. Match that with how easy it is to create a "gui" now with HTML and CSS, stir in an endless bunch of half-baked support libraries built by people that just learned JS last month and you get the perpetual hell of the JS ecosystem.

And now that it has been adopted by startups and traditional companies, it is here to stay for a while.

Half of my development time when dealing with a new JS project is un-fucking some JS dependency that I never wanted that lives deep in the bowels of npm_modules.

There's a whole lot more to Electron than HTML / CSS and getting started with it is honestly a huge PITA, in my opinion. This is coming from someone well versed in full stack web development who has delivered substantial projects.

Maybe but it depends on what you mean by "back in the day". Because back in the day a lot of computers came preinstalled with some version of a BASIC interpreter, And some machines literally booted into basic by default, so programming became just a natural extension of the users daily computing process.

However, If you're referring to 2012 as back in the day, visual basic was by far and away completely deprecated by that point, if anything people would've been using Visual Studio community edition to do net programming and maybe visualbasic.net

This has been a professional concern for me for many years. I lead grad students with no programming experience into making their own tools for research and sharing. I've completely given up on learning a programming ecosystem and building programs from scratch. Rather, I work within applications that can be scripted to a task. I envy the engineering students for whom Matlab is enough, because that seems to be the closest modern equivalent of Visual Basic. Mathematica is sort of there, but much harder to learn and not easily shareable.

Yeah - I work with Python for my main work dealing with weather & climate data but things still throw me off. It feels like every example I run into is an easy to follow "20-steps + 10 packages + 64GB cloud server instance" process when all I want to do is to download some historical temperature data to CSV.

Example: https://github.com/jwagemann/era5_in_gee#workflow-overview

I think you sum it up well. That gap extends to more than JavaScript.

When I was four I could operate our TV: turn on, choose channel and adjust the volume. One device. One remote control. Bach then four year olds could also operate phones and record players. When I was five me and my friends could operate a tape recorder, copy music, record music, create tapes and physically share with friends and family.

There's space in tools like Godot, which has a relatively stable API, tight and helpful integration with its custom scripting language as well as support for both C# and C++, solid docs, first-class support for 2D, the ability to export to mobile as well as web and desktop, and the ability to toggle between a continuous rendering mode suitable for games and a reactive rendering mode more suitable for apps.

GameMaker, too, has a very stable API for its proprietary scripting language and, though it is made with 2D gamedev in mind, can work just fine for simple apps for personal use.

Defold is worth mentioning as well

Or you just ignore all the shiny new things and go with older technologies that work like a charm. I for one, still write code in jQuery, and don't plan to switch at least for the next five years.

Yep exactly right. Do as much as you can with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Learn the basics without depending on any packages. And only then maybe add a package if it really absolutely is worth it compared with writing a bit of extra stuff yourself. Every build system or package you rely on will become a liability and a major pain point down the road. Guaranteed.

I’m pretty sure you can still write some js and load it into the browser or node. The issue is that 10 small instructions become a hundred (thankfully) and so if you read the wrong article you will be lost.

If this guy was told to use `require` instead of `import` it would have most likely just worked. The instructions were wrong so he failed.

Even back then though you still needed to RTFM. The first time I wanted to do a bubble menu (the one that follows your cursor, focusing an item of the menu) I was redirected to Flash.

On a related note I think this is what is sort of wrong about the raspberry pi as tool for teaching beginners: the first thing the user sees and interacts with is Linux. In the 80s on a bubber key spectrum as far as I can recall it booted straight into a basic prompt / repl (or whatever the right term is). Even 8 year old me could start programming. Compare that to trying to get anywhere with Linux as a beginner.

I think in this particular case, the problem was just picking the wrong tool for the job. Python is the primary language used for data science these days, but it is not particularly designed for it. It is a general purpose programming language. If they had chosen something like R, their path would have been a lot smoother.

Smoother but not smooth. I once, not by choice, taught R to humanities grad students who had never programmed before. The wailing and gnashing of teeth over the course that semester was considerable, and I have stoutly refused to ever do it again. The irony of it was that they really didn't need to do anything that couldn't be done in Excel.

> We've gotten to the point where you cannot be SLIGHTLY interested in computers, want to make a quick app for yourself

it seems Excel is the last place like this - to make small pseudo apps, but it comes with its own fair share of problems (mostly calculations or Excel as a database, no sharing)

I think VBA used to be the thing, but the one inside MS Office is "technologically" stuck around year 1996

Whatever you think of it, I think that MS tries to cater for these people with things like Flow and PowerApps with Office 365

In a sense no-code tools are today’s Visual Basic.

Well, not really. The no-code tool of the 90s was Access or maybe Excel. VB was useful exactly because it was code, but simplified. One thing the Microsoft stack really nailed was a smooth(er) on-ramp. There was a big gap between VB and C++ which is partly what motivated the development of C#/Java but otherwise, you could start with Excel or Access, move up to VBA and build an actually useful app that delivered business value. Then you could take those skills and move to VB6 and build "real" apps that you could ship to users and charge money for, build whole businesses around. You could learn some Win32 using VB/Win32 interop and then progress to C, and from there, to C++, or later from VB to VB.NET and then C#.

The web stack sort of killed all that. You can start with HTML and get some results pretty fast but you'll very rapidly hit the limits of what can be done there and suddenly be hit with this giant wall of complexity. NodeJS helps because now you can use the same language on backend and frontend, but even getting to the point where you have a frontend and backend requires mastering a heap of tech with appalling usability (like UNIX). And the modern JS ecosystem is sufficiently complicated that you'll hit problems like the ones described in the article.

One way to fix this is to bring the VB6 model back, by making desktop apps great again. It can be done. There are toolkits that make it easy to write standalone cross-platform apps (e.g. JVM languages+JavaFX, Flutter, the new C# stuff, Qt, etc). There's no fundamental reason distributing desktop apps must be difficult, it's just a neglected area of tooling.

And that's a nice segue to my current startup, which is tackling exactly that problem. We've produced a tool that makes distributing desktop apps as easy as distributing web apps is (or easier!). It takes the output of your build system (if any) as inputs, and builds self-updating packages for Windows, macOS and Linux without needing you to actually have any of those platforms. It can also fully sign those packages itself (without needing macOS or Windows), or self-sign them in which case you get a `curl | bash` type install experience and the PowerShell equivalent for Windows. Finally it produces a simple download HTML page that detects the user's OS and gives them a nice big green button to click.

We've talked to one well known tech firm that wants to integrate this into their products and a driving reason is, in fact, educational. They have a lot of new programmers who use their developer tools and who learn with a desktop toolkit because it's easy to get things on the screen, there's one language to learn, it's all cleanly following the principles they're taught in class (like objects) and so on. But then they hit a wall when they want to show their friends and family what they're doing, or graduate to actually getting real users. Smoothing that on-ramp should help a lot.

At the moment the tool is in private beta, but if you want to try it email me (address in my profile). After public launch it'll be free for open source projects, licensed for commercial projects. Thinking about a feature that automatically bundles source and adds a "view source" button to the apps, to help students who haven't yet mastered uploading code to GitHub.

> the only reason this barrier was ever breached for this person was due to their large twitter following

I feel like their approach to solving the problem actually does represent how most people deal with it - they ASK someone. There are hundreds of massive programming discord servers, with extremely engaged tutors, helpers, and resources.

If you want to learn to program, you'll need guidance, and I think that's OK. You won't go buying any old welder and some metal and just start welding (or at least it won't go very well). You'll seek out people who already do it, get advice, or maybe even seek an education in it if you are really aiming for the long term.

Programming looks like it has a low barrier of entry, because you don't have to commit to much. To weld you need to buy (or rent) a welder and material, to do carpentry you need to buy at least some basic tools, to work on your car you need a car, to be an architect you'll need to pay someone to build it, etc.

For programming, you seemingly only need a computer (or even just a phone), which most people have access to. This apparent lack of need for commitment makes it look like "it shouldn't be that hard", but that's IMO a complete misunderstanding.

This is why I'd prefer hiring people who have at least somewhat of a formal programming education. In my university, for example, we learned how to use git, linux, write JS, CSS, html, c++, php, do SQL, manage and design databases, and generally just learned a lot of "background knowledge". With that, it's trivial to pick up almost any tech afterwards.

For anyone else trying to get into programming, join a discord or reddit, or slack, or matrix, or IRC community, which is focused on what you're learning. It will save you weeks of trying.

Have you ever actually tried to do this? Programmers are extremely opinionated people. If you somehow manage to get past the barrier of "pretending to look smart so you can even ask a question without getting flamed to hell and back (hello, stackoverflow!)" you will be met with people suggesting different things, which quickly devolves into a giant argument about which thing is better and why this guy is so stupid for liking that thing over this thing and it becomes absolutely impossible to get anything done.

And again, there is a baseline expectation of knowledge that people have which is far, far too high. Even if, by some miracle, you get someone telling you to type "xyz" in the terminal, I doubt anyone has enough patience for the next question of "what's a terminal". This is the baseline understanding we need to allow for and the vast majority of tech enthusiasts, programmers, and others just don't get that.

Yes I have tried to do this, and I do this kind of "helping others" a lot on discord.

StackOverflow is about the worst helping platform. That's not the kind of platform I was talking about, I was specifically mentioning discord and reddit. r/cpp, r/c_programming, and some discord servers like the "programming" discord are great.

I see what you're saying, but that is NOT the experience I've had at all on most communities other than StackOverflow. I really urge you to actually try it and have a look.

I'm one of those learners and this is true to an extent. But there's fantastic people in r/learnprogramming for example. Even better than the Discord of the self-paced bootcamp I'm doing...

But the complexity is real. I'm learning Django, which is supposedly easy, and it's a completely different beast than learning the in and outs of a language. And Django has good documentation, for some libraries it's a mess.

You picked a tough spot to start!

Meh, I'm following the path they tell me. You're probably right tho, but I guess they want to make me employable.

I feel that I will use Django for personal stuff in the future too, so althogh it is comples I have enough drive to get through it.

I can't be many hours on it though. Programming was much more motivating when I was learning the basics, I could be coding all day with no problem. I loved the challenges they sent me.

Setting aside Django and learning it as a beginner, the job market for Python as a whole is a bit odd. It's great for grad students coming in from other disciplines but pretty harsh and credentialist towards the more typical self-taught web dev profile.

That said, both the concrete things you pick up with the language and the meta skills you pick up fighting with frameworks, libraries and dependencies will come in useful. Keep learning and you'll be more employable. Best of luck! I've been there.

Thanks, after Django comes Spring. I found java cumbersome but apparently there's much more java work in spain.

I'll see how it goes.

>I doubt anyone has enough patience for the next question of "what's a terminal"

Have you spent time trying to teach people stuff?

Most people have no idea whatsoever how to learn things. Instead of asking "what's a terminal?" and getting a grunt in response, they won't even ask.

Learning things greatly outside your expertise needs a huge time and effort investment towards grokking the basics of the subject.

Most adults are goal-oriented, which means they won't do the hard work of really getting the basics, nor even think that maybe they should be asking, reading and writing down stuff they don't know that won't immediately help with their goal, but is fundamental to not end up bumbling about cluelessly.

The standard behaviour is like trying to solve differential equations without knowing what a function is. Just trying stuff works if what you are trying to do is piss easy, and it won't work if it requires any building blocks / isn't piss easy.

Instead of looking at a term they don't understand and grinding until they understand it (which is often a recursive endeavour), they are just trying to make it work.

Mind you, I agree with most. However:

>With that, it's trivial to pick up almost any tech afterwards.

The fact most of the market does not align with this at all kind of shows to me the contrast between "passionate people willing to help get stuff done" and "a brutal corporate market where everything not perfect nets you a fat zero, despite projects being way more samey and boring". The job market for juniors is absolutely brutal and it is already expanding to other levels to a point where if you mess up or don't have the "right experiences", you're still effectively a junior still according to the market. Through no fault of your own. Couple that with a "we're looking for i+1 experienced people to do i-1 work" mentality and the number of corporations which don't do this being extremely limited.

On top of that, tech also has a large "trial-and-error" part to it which most people should be willing to acknowledge. If we're not mutating upon existing solutions, we might as well just package the existing thing into an instant solution. The mutating on existing solutions is the difficult part.

This thread for me looks like a narcissistic attention seeking rather than real process.

She could simply start learning on datacamp - i went back to it after many years and it's perfect. Low level of entry, "box where you write python code and it runs", you don't have to install pandas, but course will teach you to do it if you want.

She began this thread from saying that she started a few courses... Hard to believe. Or she didn't wanted to pay for it to get them at a professional (in educational terms) level.

She wants to analyze her data - cool, but seriously, it's like any ignorant person would say that they want to do anything that requires some expertise... I want to build a car, why it's so difficult?!?! Twitter help!

Read the rest of this persons twitter, or their website for that matter.

No I don’t think there is anything enlightening whatsoever about their experience “trying” to learn to program. They spent 10 minutes installing the interpreter, and then got upset for their social medial followers because they weren’t immediately able to write software to do something useful with their CSV.

I cannot think of any other discipline where “I bought a woodworking shop and then couldn’t immediately make cabinets 10 minutes after walking inside” would be considered insightful towards anything other than the person writing it.

There are SO many people who spend their time trying to help others program. Literally thousands of them. “Aella” could have spent an hour watching any of their videos or reading any of their tutorials instead of this.

I think the problem here is that there's so many tutorials, articles etc telling people that if they want to do data analysis then the best way is to use Python without making it clear that this advice is predicated on you already having a programming education. If you start with a CSV file and want to do some analysis, without knowing programming, then you need to using a spreadsheet app, but this context isn't being reliably given to people. Instead they absorb a background assumption that "real" data analysis is based on programming and immediately drown when they try it.

It's no different in woodworking. I'm constantly turned off when I try to start by the fact that basically every easy-to-find woodworking tutorial assumes you have 3-4 different power saws already ready to go in your garage. It's hard to find content that gets you started with basic tools on small, inexpensive projects.

Experts in any field are usually terrible teachers because they don't understand anymore what it means to be a beginner.

(As an aside, I'd love suggestions for woodworking content that does start small.)

Something like this: https://famousartisan.com/diy_2x6_deck_chair_plans/

Would be very easy to make with basic hand tools. In fact, what might be fun is to just look at the picture of that, and try to reverse engineer the parts for it. (I teach woodworking classes, and this is actually an exercise I make the students do in one of the classes).

This saw would be fine: https://www.amazon.com/CRAFTSMAN-Hand-20-Inch-Finish-CMHT208...

If you can afford it, something like this will last you a very long time (probably a lifetime): https://www.amazon.com/DEWALT-12-Inch-15-Amp-Compound-DWS715...

If you really want something that will definitely last you a lifetime (or two): https://www.amazon.com/SKILSAW-SPT88-01-Drive-Bevel-Sliding/...

If you want something that is pretty good at most things, get this: https://www.amazon.com/SKILSAW-SPT77WML-01-15-Amp-Lightweigh...

This is a handheld saw, but it's a very nice one, and could absolutely be used to make many, many things out of wood. You can use it for almost anything, and people do.

Another thing which you will use all the time (and I mean ALL the time, regardless of if you are doing woodworking or not) is a good set of handheld drills: https://www.amazon.com/Milwaukee-2697-22CT-18-Volt-Lithium-I...

If you want a long series of videos to watch, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4...

Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh6cMQnWGwA

Honestly, reading the thread from my perspective (as a self-taught amateur) I get some of the frustration, but also see that the tweeter was their own worst enemy.

The basic basics - how to install Python, handle modules, and maybe execute scripts, would have been dealt with in the first few minutes of many beginner tutorials - and would have handled all of their initial teething frustrations.

And while I get the desire to build something real (I don’t think I’ve ever completed a full tutorial as I always dive off into what I wanted to make in the first place) not even being willing to sit for an hour to learn the basics is far beyond ‘goal oriented’ - and is obviously seriously limiting and self-defeating.

> needlessly complicated

IMO this is unfair characterization.

If using Photoshop is driving, programming is building an internal combustion engine vehicle. You cannot expect to just randomly google for car-making tutorials and get an SUV done in a weekend. Heck, you can't even expect to be able to build a very simple combustion engine from basic principles without a lot of study.

I'm not saying this is Aella's fault or anything, it's fair to have wrong expectations, but calling this "needlessly complicated" is not fair either.

If I had to take something away from that Twitter thread is how marvelous is that someone without any programming experience has been able to programatically manipulate CSV data in a couple of days.

I also think that Aella had abstraction mismatch. Python does not know what CSV is when she tries to "Okay, cool. I want to upload a csv, the data I want to analyze". It sounds to python identical as if you said "Make me a sandwich". You need to explain to python what a "sandwich" is, using abstraction that python understands. In CSV case this work is done by pandas.

So for that first you need to LEARN what abstractions python has and how to use them to build higher level abstractions.

It's like being angry at hammer that it cant be used as surgical scalpel. "it's a tool, so it should do what i need"

I feel a bit of this every time there are pushes to get everyone to code, it's very weird. Sort of related is the expectation that you should just be able to switch into a programming career in a few weeks. You can't do that with almost any other meaningful career but for some reason you "should" be able to for programming and there are very profitable businesses selling the lie that you can.

I agree, the expectation of everyone being able to switch to a programming career is of course ridiculous. Neither should this be the expectation nor should everyone actually get into a programming career. Better to leave that to the professionals, who have chosen this path and have the necessary education to avoid building in the typical traps. Learning programming can take a week, but mastering it may take a lifetime. Just the fact, that a person can write a little bit of code, does not mean, that it must become their profession.

However, I do think, that people should be able to make use of the tools they have. Learning a little bit of programming can get people going a long way and there are so many learning resources out there, that you can learn more any time you want. (Of course tutorial hell is a thing.) We really should encourage people to become computer literate and to become enabled. There is no reason to keep our knowledge from people.

I don't think this is a good analogy.

Not every programming project is a project that takes hundreds of skilled engineers. Not every programming project needs to deliver a product for others to use.

What Aella wants to do is something pretty simple, and it's frustratinc that this is so hard.

> What Aella wants to do is something pretty simple, and it's frustratinc that this is so hard.

What Aella wants to actually do and how she describes what she wants to do may not have any relationship to each other. So we've got a potential X/Y problem.

Then there's just the jumping in assuming Python is like Photoshop. You can "learn Photoshop" just by playing around with it. You won't be a graphic designer after a week of goofing around but you can make a cool logo for a web page or touch up photos you took with your phone.

What Photoshop is to a selfie, Python is not to a CSV file. Even "CSV file" is ambiguous because that can actually mean a lot of different things.

The difference between the Aella case and the story in the OP is Aella is assuming Python is Photoshop for CSV files. The OP knows JavaScript is a language and has a notion of how npm is supposed to work. Aella got bit by ignorance and stubbornness. The OP got bit by terrible tools.

> What Aella wants to do is something pretty simple, and it's frustratinc that this is so hard.

It's not that hard.

Doing it like a Real Data Scientist is hard, but also completely unnecessary for a beginner non-programmer. That doesn't stop well-meaning folks from advising that approach (install pandas, Jupyter, anaconda, etc.) and overwhelming people.

The Python standard library is batteries included. IDLE exists.

I think the problem is that there are so many options, some more accessible to newcomers, some less. For example, I think Thonny is a nice entry level Python "GUI"

But it's really hard to find what to start with from a google search.

> I think the problem is that there are so many options, some more accessible to newcomers, some less. For example, I think Thonny is a nice entry level Python "GUI"

And I think users tend to grow out of entry-level tools pretty quickly so it's hard for any one option to become universal.

> But it's really hard to find what to start with from a google search.

That's true, but I think it has a lot more to do with the quality of educational material for beginners than the simplicity or complexity of available tools.

>I don't wanna learn how programming building blocks work as I use them to build a lil rando pile, I want to learn how they work as I use them to build the actual house I want.

Well, unfortunately some things are difficult, and knowing fundamentals helps you with those difficult tasks. I also don't complain that I can't learn to fly a plane by starting the engine with zero knowledge and learning while taking off. The author then goes on to say that in four days they learned everything they wanted to do, without any programming background, so I don't understand why these tweets are written in such a dramatic way

This was my thought too. When learning to drive, I don't really care about what the clutch is or does, I want to know how I can go from my house to the shop, or my house to my friend's house. But I understand that I need to be aware of the components and processes that go into driving a car. I can't just sit in it and expect it to whisk me away.

That Twitter post seems a bit whiny. The expectation that a general purpose language, basically a huge professional toolset would be readily obvious to a non professional who doesn't even grasp the concepts of variables in imperative programming. If I would step in a wood workshop I don't expect I'll be able to produce much without first aquiring some basic skills. The OP thinks that being Goal oriented should give them magic abilities to understand the tools without learning them. A Very odd expectation...

This doesn't absolve Python though, the whole dependency story is rather bad and the language have many warts. But, The ecosystem can never be simple enough for someone like the OP while still be an OSS distributly developed general purpose seelanguage.

The person in that twitter thread clearly has some issues beyond learning Python, their response was extremely angry, dramatic, and entitled. "Angry tears welling up" is not a reasonable response to learning anything, especially when not having a deadline and just learning it for fun. To me this reads more like a mental health breakdown live streamed on twitter than of something that actually says anything about Python. I wouldn't be comfortable interacting with them at all

Aella_Girl has a reputation in other communities for being a bit unhinged, so that tracks.

May not be a popular opinion, but a lot of the “rationalist” scene often feels more like a club of sophists.

Hmm

https://knowingless.com/get-my-eggs/

> Get My Eggs

> I think my genes are wonderful, I’d like to see more of them in the world, and I don’t have any immediate plans for reproducing myself.

> If you’re interested in using my eggs to reproduce, I’m down to discuss this in exchange for payment for my time and fear of needles. I have ancestry, health testing, and family history I can share.

> Contact me at aellasinbox@gmail.com; sometimes my responses go to spam, so be sure to check spam!

> a lot of people, ESPECIALLY programmers, vastly overestimate the competence of the average person

This is always true, but I think it's a slight misdiagnosis here specifically. The problem isn't over-estimating competence but under-estimating complexity.

I've watched a bunch of very smart, highly-competent people bounce off JS; that's not a fault with them but with the ever-changing and overly-complicated ecosystem.

On the thread: Author has unrealistic expectations. They should pick up a Python intro book and work through at least the first couple of chapters. In the time they cluelessly floundered around they probably would have had most of their outstanding issues cleared out.

An astonishing number of people here are missing the point. Doing something like "making a small script to analyze CSVs" has become a massively complicated undertaking requiring you to follow random guides that might be 6 months old (practically half a century in these circles), install random programs and dependencies using other random programs and dependencies that you don't even understand, and do many steps that seem like completely nonsense.

Yes, it's incredibly complex. It doesn't have to be and a lot of it is completely unnecessary, driven by the tech world's inability to stick with literally anything for more than a few years before collectively deciding it's all trash and you should REALLY be using this brand new thing that only half works instead. It doesn't need to be this hard, and that's what I'm trying to say. Using this to shit on the person for thinking their simple task would be simple is completely missing the point - if anything, it proves it.

The author of the tweets doesn't seem very interested in learning the basics. They want to open Python and magically start processing CSV.

That's not how that works. CSV processing is an easy task if you know the basics and read the manual. The author wants to skip the boring parts that are essential for the easy part of their objective. They get frustrated with terms they don't know and tools they haven't heard of but seem unwilling to read up on their problem, instead copy pasting stuff until it works and then looking up what went wrong afterwards. Yeah, you're going to have a terrible time learning anything if you're not willing to understand the basics before throwing your frustrations at them until they work.

If I go into a sculpting class saying "I don't want to learn about materials, I came here to sculpt my own version of Michelangelo's David" then I would be told to shut up, sit down, and start learning.

Just because someone can't get their instant gratification doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the field of programming. If you're goal oriented then you'd better be willing to learn every single requirement for reaching that goal or you won't succeed.

I think the fact that the author managed to learn how to process their CSV in four days is a testament to how far we've come. It took me weeks to get to that level on my own with the manuals and offline tutorials I downloaded on the school PCs.

Manipulating csv has become way easier than it was.

You have: 1. Spreadsheets where you can import this data and manipulate it visually 2. CLI tools made especially to work on csv, with fancy colors, shortcuts, examples 3. Visual tools for data analysis like google data studio, power bi etc. Where you basically dragon drop the data and pick charts 4. RStudio where you can load your data using file->open and then copy some simple commands to work on it 5. No-code tools where you can copy paste the data and add functionality by clicking through tutorials 6. All kinds of online notebooks where you don't have to install pandas...

It has not became harder.

swear to god if one more person talks about the specifics of this illustrative case, and then goes on to explain how they are so silly and should have used tool "xyz" my head is going to explode

You don't need to use any tool, it's a general purpose programming language, so "making a script to analyze csv" requires you to learn the basics of programming and what csv is.

It's not unnecessarily complex, but expecting people to handhold and teach you programming for free when you haven't shown any commitment to learning is silly. If you were to do this, you will essentially be writing programs for clueless people for free and they just move on(they may not learn anything).

If you want to learn programming join a bootcamp or a hacker group or get a formal education(where people will be paid for this).

Python does not know what a CSV file is. It doesn't know what a JPEG is. If you want to work with these things you have to tell Python what they are. If you want to use a library to do that you need to know how to install a library such that Python knows what it is and where it is.

You can play around in Photoshop because and get decent results because it already knows what a JPEG is. All of the tools are built around working with 2D images and share a set of abstractions. You might do a shitty job but you're not likely to break your image or be unable to do anything.

Python is not "Photoshop for CSV files". It's not Photoshop for anything. So you must learn some basics to use it an Aella decided learning was stupid and she could just copy and paste her way through the process.

A rational person confronts by terms they didn't understand in some instructions would take a step back and realize maybe they were missing some fundamentals.

I'm not sure if you've read my comment.

I was replying to your: > Yes, it's incredibly complex. It doesn't have to be

It's not complex.

Download Python.

import csv

Download python.

Data = open(“file.csv”, “r”)

For line in data.readlines(): Print(line.split”,”)

Well...

Blah1, blah2, "blah3, blah4", blah5

Maybe using a library is a better route.

Okay sure, but I have processed millions of lines of csv data using readlines and split.

Eventually yeah you’re going to run into something with characters you don’t like, but that’s just a teaching/learning moment!

For this profile, a fully integrated environment like Squeak/Pharo or Racket would be a better option. Perhaps even just Emacs! :-)

I won't disagree with you about the needless complexity, but OTOH programming does have a certain level of essential complexity, and profanes don't realize that "just upload the CSV" is fundamentally not an easy task; think about what you'd need to do if you were to do it from scratch in assembly. Lines in a text file is not something "the computer" or many OS have a concept of. I think a few developers could ragequit.

Of course, there is the "batteries included" solution - that is gluing together libraries with a simple language. Here I would rather see something like Lua rather than Python because OO is already an interference for normies. This is doable, the particular failures of Python here (or any of the languages I've mentioned) are to blame on Python's ecosystem (perhaps being too normie-friendly is a curse, because you sometimes end up with poorly done tools and libs - I see it in Lua too).

One last word: I learned programming from books alone with Basic (back in the days when phones had wires and I didn't have to shave). The books provided the source of simple games that I were to type in (Basic was a CLI but you could list and edit lines, better than the "Python Box" :-), test and then hack. This is a much easier approach than starting from scratch, and by the end of the Twitter thread it seems that this is what this person eventually came to - people would give them a basic program they could hack.

From the linked thread:

> I don't wanna learn how programming building blocks work as I use them to build a lil rando pile, I want to learn how they work as I use them to build the actual house I want. If what I'm learning isn't connected to a payoff, then I lose the stamina to wade through the problems.

As a teacher, this resonates

> It's no wonder many people basically view anything past the surface level of computers as dark magic, and we call people good with these magical devices "wizards".

The dirty secret is that, due to the consultant effect, that feeling tends to owe its existence to those "wizards" who are happy for things to remain that way (and go around making it so where it's not already).

The Computer Lib Pledge (<https://archive.org/details/springer_10.1007-978-3-319-16925...>):

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

I am going to help make people free through computers.

I will not help the computer priesthood confuse and bully the public.

I will endeavor to explain patiently what computer systems really do. I will try to answer people's questions kindly, or explain that I do not have time. I will not treat any question as a dumb question, since there is no such thing.

I will not give misleading answers to get people off my back, like "Because that's the way computers work" instead of "Because that's the way I designed it."

I will stand firm against the forces of evil. I will speak up against computer systems that are oppressive, insulting or unkind, and do the best I can to improve or replace them, if I cannot prevent them from being bought or created in the first place. I will fight injustice, complication, and any company that makes things difficult on purpose.

I will do all I can to further human understanding, especially through the new visualizing tools of interactive computer graphics.

I will do what I can to make systems easy to understand, interactive wherever possible, and fun for the user.

I will try not to make fun of another's favorite computer language, even if it is COBOL or BASIC.

So help me.

-- Ted Nelson

> vastly overestimate the competence of the average person

Computers have gotten vastly more complicated to program than they used to be.

The reason for this is, other programmers are not really motivated to make it easy.

It is also wise not to underestimate the fact that intentionally incompetent interfaces make it all a ball of puke. Most programmers are puke surfers these days, maybe not so much in in the embedded world so, but for sure up front in the ''mainstream'' of javascript/web development.

Just kidding, embedded has puke surfing too.

> Shows that a lot of people, ESPECIALLY programmers, vastly overestimate the competence of the average person when it comes to whatever they are an expert at.

Sorry, no it does not. It shows me a lot of people are perfectly competent but lack the motivation or proper expectations. Once the person gets more into the data analysis, I'm sure they'll realize why tutorials just don't show how to do data analysis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com