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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

idk, if you have a decent grasp of the fundamentals you can get up to speed these days in pretty much whatever language/sub discipline with a couple days of hard study with LLMs

i made the transition from embedded C to low level tensor wrangling in about a week, it takes some work but it's definitely doable, of course i'm not an expert but it's enough time to go pretty deep, i went from "yeah i've run ollama" to optimizing inference code to get research papers to run on consumer hardware

if the task is to get up to speed on C++ enough to teach undergrads and you're a reasonably competent academic programmer who gives at least half a shit about the task at hand a weekend is plenty

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C++ is famously hard. I know C++ for at least 15 years, made a reasonably successful side project in is, worked professionally for 2 years, and I still don't think I should teach it to others. I could probably do a decent job, but if they ask me about SFINAE or modern (after C++11 with bits of 14 maybe) features or "is this snippet UB" I would have to concede. Learning C++ in a week good enough to teach it is a cruel joke and laughing students straight in their face.

Well if you are not qualified enough to teach C++ then who is? Students have to learn somehow.

If you have very good C knowledge, maybe a weekend is enough to have decent C++. Maybe not to teach it, but decent.

However, assuming no C knowledge, there's no way in hell you'll be a good teacher of C++ in a weekend, even with LLMs.

Wtf is this take. You are the worst candidate for a teacher if you have no experience with the language and have rushed to teach it.

The article talks about a literal "learn c++ in 48hs".

Give me a break. You'd be absolutely mediocre and those of us who know our shit do notice. Source: I've been that student that worked and studied the topic he worked with and found some of the TAs absolutely wanting.

I'm sorry, but your reply suggests an incredible disdain for both technical expertise and for educators. There is value in depth&breadth of knowledge, and it takes great skill to craft a good curriculum.

From a US perspective, students paying $50,000+ per year in tuition deserve better than an overworked PI who has crammed C++ over the weekend.

Interesting, I feel the opposite, I agree that an excellent teacher who knows the material back to front is invaluable.

My general model for how "being good at programming works" is that it's just mostly a stacking buff based on how much you've touched, I'm choosing to give the person in the anecdote the benefit of the doubt and believe in both their technical expertise and skill as an educator. Most technical things are kind of like other technical things, and if you've been around for a while everything is kind of like something you've done before, it makes it very easy to pick up new tools/domains. I fully believe that someone can open up a VAST gulf of knowledge of C++ between themselves and intro to C++ folks in a weekend if they're already a seasoned practitioner.

Nope, some superficially similar technical things are founded on very different concepts from other technical things. For example, grokking a functional language requires a whole different mental model than for an imperative language.

Also, remember that you could pick up a new language and start to dabble in it after a few days, but teaching it, ah, that requires much more than using it . Usually teaching something requires a much deeper understanding than just using it.

As an educator I disagree. In my field of expertise I am so far in advance of my students’ skills that I can be three standard deviations in skill better than the average student in my class in any cognate field in two days and further ahead than that in a week or a month. That’s what “technical expertise” is.

I won’t speak to crafting a good curriculum, God knows I’ve seen plenty of bad ones but it’s just not hard for me to be vastly better at any topic in English or History than any student I’m likely to see in a high school in two days because I’m that much better than them at what I do. I presume the same yawning gulf in capability exists between the average freshly minted PhD and undergraduates, or professors teaching graduate courses and PhD students.

Expertise exists, which is why I can be teaching a course that’s supposed to take 300 hours of instruction to cover in 15 hours, reasonably comfortably.

Way to miss the point. You've missed it so thoroughly it's crazy.

Feel free to explain what you mean that you think of so obvious and obviously correct.

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