On why learning to program is hard | Hacker News Reader

On why learning to program is hard

hostiledeveloper.com

18 pointsStevenNunez5 comments

I suspect learning programming is hard because programming in any particular language isn't just the language.

It's also an eco-system. Libraries, learning how to find things that others have done. It's what your program is connected to, how to interface with other devices and things written in other languages, (and so on.)

Most tutorial books I've read are tours of the standard library functions that the author uses regularly. Perhaps communicated via toy programs, perhaps not. If that's the interface people are initially presented with, (and I'd be amazed if that's not most people's experience of Learn To Program tutorial books,) then of course programming is going to be hard to get into.

It's all those things and the ability to see how very small parts form to create a larger thing.

Or in the words of Donald Knuth: "the psychological profiling [of a good programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large."

Note that he doesn't necessarily mean "low level" as in "machine code and system calls" just smaller parts of a system.

One of my favorite programming tutorials is "Write Yourself A Scheme." It's not "Here's the language, here's the API, etc" it's "Let's accomplish this task. Here's some documentation. Here's a breakdown of what you need to do. Figure out how to do it." There's no answer key to the exercises, either your solution worked or you need to redo it.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...

As someone who doesn't know Ruby, I would like to point out that this program is an excellent demonstration of why Ruby's non-standard syntax is awful, confusing and hard to learn!

Ruby's syntax for defining a function is apparently:

    fizz_buzz = ->(number) do
        ... stuff ...
    end

This is very confusing if you've used C where -> is a binary operator. I understand what it does, but only because I've used Coffeescript. And the "do" keyword in most languages is used to signal loops, apparently "do...end" is a block delimiter in Ruby instead.

Having functions be defined with expressions is confusing.

The string mess on the next line is an awful feature that makes languages such as shell, Perl and PHP bug-prone -- and no exception here. Apparently double quoting in Ruby means next to nothing, because it seems like a damn-near Turing complete language which has magic meaning inside quotes. The double quotes, pound sign, braces, and question marks have meanings here that are rather non-obvious.

Pff easy.

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