Comment by cconstantine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cconstantine | Hacker News Reader

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"I’m very skeptical of results that claim that some large fraction of the population is incapable of some mental feat like programming. 500 years ago the same was thought of reading, writing, and arithmetic."

Exactly. At birth we are basically no different from someone born 100, 500, 1000 years ago. People in the past we not stupid. In fact, the giants who's shoulders we stand on now are from the past.

This isn't to say the camel doesn't have two humps. I tried pretty hard in college to learn German, but by then it was too late. Kids can learn languages without even trying because they're wired to learn languages. Waiting till college to learn German effectively doomed me to failure.

A similar thing might be happening with programming. Some people don't start thinking about programming until pretty late, sometimes as late as college or beyond. Perhaps some of the people who "just can't get it" could have had a chance if they started sooner.

This would imply that there is no fix at the college level; the solution is to start introducing programming/logic earlier.

There are people who attain native-level proficiency in foreign languages as adults. It is true that children more often do it, but it also seems to take them longer.

How many hours a week did you study German in college? I think children growing up in Germany typically study it about 70 to 90 hours a week if their parents are foreigners, or 110 hours a week otherwise, and it takes them about six or seven years to reach a high level of proficiency.

By contrast, an acquaintance of mine studied Mandarin Chinese only 40 hours a week as an adult (22-year-old I think) for six months, and then spent the next several years transcribing and analyzing intercepted Chinese telephone conversations 40 hours a week for the next couple of years, thereby achieving a native level of proficiency.

So my alternative hypothesis is that kids learn languages well because they try really hard for tens of thousands of hours, while adults rarely do.

I knew someone would say this ;)

It is true some adults can learn language almost as easily as children, but that's the exception. The main point is that as you get older (for the vast majority of people), learning a new language becomes more difficult. A similar effect may be happening with programming.

I don't think that needing thirty thousand hours of practice to learn something qualifies as learning it "easily", and that's how long children normally take to learn their first language. Adults can often learn new languages to an expert or native level of competency in only ten or twenty thousand hours of practice. What's exceptional is the adult who takes that amount of time to learn a language, challenging themselves and trying to improve the whole time.

(Exceptional adults may be able to do it in less time, and far less time to achieve a lower level of competency. Sidis supposedly could "learn" a new language in a day.)

Hmm, to avoid this being a back-and-forth between us, I attempted to find a reference for my point (which I was taught from multiple professors in college, and backed up by personal experience)... and I couldn't find any.

I could find reference to "the myth that children learn languages easier than adults". I'm shocked that my child psychology and cognitive psychology professors (who both taught a section on language development) would get that wrong, but it's entirely possible.

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