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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

It is kind of frustrating how pervasive the "programming can be learned in an afternoon" mindset is, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Pardon me for being insulted by the insinuation that something that took me 40 years to become as proficient as I am with it can be mastered by everybody else in a few months.

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I mean... chess can be learned in an afternoon, too. A few minutes of memorizing the standard movements of each piece followed by maybe a half hour of learning the exceptions (castling, en passant, etc.) and you've "learned how to play chess". A handful of games later and you start to get a feel for the relative importance of the pieces.

I wouldn't argue that anyone expects to be competitive with a grandmaster at that point, though.

There is always a programmer better than you, as with any skill. In my practical view, programming is using a tool to solve a problem, not a game.

> Pardon me for being insulted by the insinuation that something that took me 40 years to become as proficient as I am with it can be mastered by everybody else in a few months.

I don't think anyone who claims that "programming can be learned in an afternoon" understands that to mean "programming can be mastered in an afternoon". Mastery comes, in large part, from experience, and there is no shortcut to experience.

Programming can be learned in an afternoon, just not mastered.

No. Some syntax can be learned in an afternoon, that's it

Eh, my experience suggests otherwise. I've taught Python to high schoolers and adults in an afternoon. Were they doing anything terribly interesting? Not really, but they were making their own programs. They still had a lot to learn, mind you, but they did learn to program.

Do you think they would've been able to independently solve a problem/design a program after just one session? Genuinely curious. I've had limited experience teaching people to program, but my experience has been that people teach themselves to program and you can only really be a resource for them. You can teach syntax easily but design and problem solving seem impossible to transfer; you can make the process easier but they have to teach it to themselves.

Addendum: I'm currently volunteering with a project teaching middle school children to program, and I am impressed by how much they're able to accomplish after a single lesson. I'm not sure they're independently designing programs or solving problems, but they're definitely independently exploring the space adjacent to the example programs by experimenting, and they're making sense of the results and learning. It helps that this is a graphical/block environment where they're able to discover syntax and keywords on their own, and ingest the program output as cool patterns/behaviors.

I would categorize that as learning syntax tbh.

Have to stipulate definitions about what "learn" means. It's neither binary nor mastery. I would say syntax counts if you can do things that didn't happen on their own beforehand without copy & pasting.

Why should you be offended that learning materials are improving, toolchains are getting easier, and net access is available to all now?

It's like complaining that automatics exist. You can still drive manual! You have that on people! But fundamentally it is a simpler field than it was then, due to the gigabytes of abstraction for every little thing you can do with a computer now.

That points toward an attribution error or a fundamental insecurity.

This is not at all what the poster is saying.

Why are you insulted by such a claim if you know it's naive and false?

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