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Comment by nudge | Hacker News Reader

Do you feel the same way about learning to speak foreign languages and play musical instruments? Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments? What if it is not even likely that they will ever have French-language conversations "of value"? Does the very act of proposing learning this new skill insult French speakers everywhere?

I keep encountering this attitude among programmers, that the idea of "learning" is something that is the completion of a journey of worthiness. It's extremely disappointing.

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I don't know... but I've had coworkers who are not professional programmers, but who wind up "helping out" with programming on the job, and I desperately wished that instead, they didn't know a thing.

Instead of them respecting my job more, they come to respect it less because they think they can do it just as well as I can. They think they're perfectly capable of forming time estimates because they insist "they" could do x task quickly, despite the fact that they're clueless about architecture, refactoring, documentation, testing, etc. They have no conception of why spaghetti code is bad, or what it even is.

Of course, this is all probably due more to management problems than anything else, but it is a very good example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

And as for the French analogy: I've known people who claim to speak French and then get themselves into hairy situations due to misunderstandings because they greatly over-estimate their skills and are overconfident in what they "think" they understood. It's equally infuriating.

Exactly. I don't know why I've been hearing this so much lately. I've been researching about learning to use 3D software (3dsmax) and I get the same responses that I hear about learning to code: "oh it is very difficult and it will takes at least 5-10 years to be able to build anything of quality" Personally, I think if it takes you 10 years to become decent at anything, then you are doing it wrong.

2-5 years with 3ds should definitely put you in the "decent" category.

There is a big difference between being "decent" at something and truly knowing it as "an extension of self". Expertise is a real thing.

If you find the 10 year rule absurd, take a look at this paper: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...

Then again, there's no speed limit: http://sivers.org/kimo

I don't know. I think some things can legitimately take some people ten years to learn, even if they are doing it right. However, my disagreement is that sometimes learning something at a cursory level, even if it doesn't allow you to do quality work, can be worthwhile. It can give you insight and appreciation of the discipline and help you work more effectively with the people that really do it. It can also be fun and make people feel proud to just be able to do it a little.

Just a quick datapoint. I've used 3dsmax casually (free, academic version), and I managed to produce some images of which I was quite proud. They weren't magnificently detailed scenes, but they were photorealistic representations of the objects I was modeling. So no, it definitely doesn't take 10 years to get to the point where you can make something meaningful in 3dsmax.

It does, however, take grit, because there's a ton of documentation to read, particularly concerning rendering settings.

Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments?

I think the implication is that it's obnoxious when people equate "learning a little French grammar and vocabulary" with "learning to speak French". Similarly, many of these pop-tech articles don't appear able to differentiate between "learning a little JavaScript grammar and vocabulary" and "learning to program". (I'd bet that the principals at the companies mentioned do know the difference, but they have an obvious incentive not to emphasize it to the press or to their potential customers.)

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