Can You Learn To Code In One Day? We Sent A Non-Nerd To Find Out
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
If every non coder could learn this it would save us all a heck of a lot of time
And before all those people come and say "Only a coder would say that" I include things like people writing various stuff in excel to help their spreadsheet calculations as coding.
This whole "Anything vaguely technical = Nerd" thing is really getting to me, maybe I have just been watching the old farts at SOPA to much
Ultimate HN linkbait.
Suzuki said, "Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill." In other words, you need to do a lot of coding (including debugging) to become proficient at it.
Sure it's like calling the making of a tune with one of those "press this object/key to make this sound, that object/key to make that sound" apps ( http://distoorted.livejournal.com/10914.html is the most recent one I saw ) "composing", but I can't even work those apps let alone design a pleasing fugue or canon. Taking 8 hours to be instructed in some very basic musical theory in that context would probably be beneficial anyway.
I may be biased, but to me the verb "to code" means implementing things that require Turing completeness to express.
These non-turing-complete languages can be used for some useful things, besides the compiler's proof that they terminate. The main use is getting totality (knowledge that for all valid inputs, you will get a valid output) and then writing programs that generate proofs. The fact a valid, total program that generates the proof exists, means that the proof exists, and we don't have to run the program! Thus, in this terminating-language context, a valid program that generates a proof, is itself a proof.
This is very useful for compiler-verified proofs of correctness about various aspects of your program.
tl;dr: Turing Completeness is taken for granted, but for many kinds of programming, it appears it may be useful to have less.
See also: Agda, Epigram, Coq.
How about on day 2 the new web coder gets an assignment: The client wants an ugly picture to cascade in the background of their website and the client is thinking about moving all their data to Sharepoint because they heard it's best solution (no matter what the problem). You're job is to deliver the the correct solution. Go.
Because if your job entails speaking to marketing execs, now you'll be more qualified to do so.
Likewise, if a crash course in coding gives you a better ability to talk to the programmers you work with, that seems like time well spent to me.
He didn't learn to code (as in solve problems) was my point. In fact someone like that may end up making problems.
Couple this basic understanding with problem solving skills and and you become able to sit down with subject matter experts and quickly come to a solution to problems they're stuck on.
Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Of course, I haven't done much CSS in a while, so I don't remember the particulars, but the important point is that you can fix this with CSS (I think).
* Overflow that extends into the page margins (looks ugly) and either forces the browser to show a scrollbar, or forces the user to resize the window to view the full text (which may not even be possible).
* Overflow that is contained within the margins, and can only be read by use of nested scrollbars (I hate those, don't you?) or again, by resizing the window to widen the content column width (again, not always possible).
Of all the options, I think forced wrapping is the most visually pleasing. Whether that can be done with CSS I don't know. I do know that introducing spaces will do it. Other techniques may involve e.g. Unicode soft hyphen, see e.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/12/13/10246...
Of course, another way to do it is to simply reject the input. That's the way Slashdot does it.
huh. i'm pretty sure i remembered slashdot inserting spaces to break up pagewidening text, but it's been a good many years so i could be wrong.