Programming: Intrinsic or Taught
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
In my opinion (which probably doesn't have that much value) programming is a mindset, not a skill. I did a 3 year qualification in Mechanical Engineering with Design specilisation, and I am now in Financial programming. Not for a minute do I regret doing the Engineering as it tought me how to think. Maths, Engineering etc are all exactly like Programming, same mindset, same approach. Having an education and experience offer you great tools to be more productive and effective, but true programming (Maths, Engineering etc) lies underneath those...
____________________________________________________________ Be brave little warrior, be VERY brave
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
I have had no formal instruction in programming, yet I can program several languages.
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
I think all learning is "self-teaching" on some level; merely attending lessons and hearing someone present the theoretical stuff probably doesn't achieve much, for most people, most of the time. I went to a Norwegian university and studied for a civil engineering degree in telematics / microelectronics. This was thirteen years ago so things may have changed but at least back then all the civil engineering degrees were very traditional beasts with lots of cross-discipline stuff. I'd have to say I emerged an expert on nothing and knowing a lot more than I had before about chemistry, static, dynamic, and quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, general and electron physics, cybernetics, analog and digital circuit design, signal processing, and above all mathematics (algebra, geometry, calculus, numerics, and discrete mathematics). There was a lot of lab work and hands-on stuff, but in my opinion it is so unfocussed for so long (one did get to narrow one's field of study towards the end) to constitute a somewhat wasteful use of time. What little I had in university about algorithm design and analysis always seemed like it would come in handy in my real world programming, but in honesty it is difficult to think of a single instance where I used it and it made a difference (i.e. led to something that I would not otherwise have been led to). I suppose that might have been different had I worked in a different domain (we do finance applications and most calculation happens in a database server, which of course we do not program imperatively - we merely query it).
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
I have no idea why, but in a free kind of IT lesson at highschool in year 8, I decided that I wanted to learn to program. We only had VB6 at the time, but I wanted to do some coding at home too. Then I discovered Visual Basic Express (2005), which led me to work with it. I pretty much self taught myself from then on (two years later), and I've been accelerated to a senior IPT class. Something that shocked me though, was when we were talking about the Neumann bottleneck (the limits caused by having commands executed sequentially), and I mentioned that you could use threading to get around it, the teacher approached me a little later, and told me that yes I could use multi-threading in my assignments, but they don't teach it. Also, looking at one of the textbooks, I saw this code (in one of the last chapters):
If x = True Then
'Do something
End If
If x = False Then
'Do something else
End IfLooks like some people in our class may have to do a little re-learning in uni. This is not to say I have nothing to gain from formal classes though: I'm going to have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to do things like heavily commenting code, doing diagrams etc. to plan and other formal programming techniques. This I suppose is something that's vital to learn for the workplace, so it'll be good to learn that. So yeah, I'm self taught, but there is definitely a benefit to formal teaching etc. :cool: I sure as hell hope I don't sound arrogant/stuck up or something like that. My code isn't really all that good, and I certainly don't have any articles here yet.
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I randomly smash buttons until I get the desired result. The more noise I make the happier management is.
Todd Smith
Plenty of enter keys? Lots of LPM? Joking. ;P
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
I've always said that "Programming is a state of mind", you either have it or you don't. Like others have said, I taught myself a little, learned syntax and a few helpful ways from College tutors, then learned loads from work colleagues when I finally go my first job. Now I work all alone, and I'm trying hard to learn from you lot, and others on the interwebs, as it's really hard not having someone to bounce ideas off of. There were a few people at college who were learning the 'Art', but I don't think they would have made good programmers, even if they did get better marks than me in the assignments!
You don't have to be mad to live here [UK], but it helps.
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
Bit of everything, and glad of it. Started at 13 - dad brought a Commodore Pet home for Xmas (yes, I am dating myself), let us play games on it for two days, then took them off and said that if we wanted to carry on playing games, we had to write them. And they had to be structured, and documented. (Guess what his job was?) Self-taught BASIC and machine code as a result (no, not assembler - it didn't have an assembler). School did not have any form of computing as an option. Continued using computers as a tool through sixth form and the first two years of college (aiming at a physics degree). Some actual tuition here in how to use an IBM mainframe and FORTRAN 4 as a physics analysis tool. Final year of college, it finally clicked that maybe computing was a viable career choice in its own right, not just a tool I took for granted for everything else. Swapped to Computer Science, learnt the basics of a dozen or so widely varying languages (enough that from then on you can just pick up almost anything else, was the theory, and yes, even back then, that included what would now be called object-oriented languages), and some excellent tuition in algorithms and basic theory. Yes, surprisingly enough, much of this is still useful. Not so much the piece of paper, but being taught how to think. Mix of self-taught at home (playing with web pages and VRML) and at work (COBOL, PL/1, meeting the horrible results of a 20-year-old program that had been modified continually for its entire life). Some courses that helped, some that didn't, some that were "how to use this specific technology", some that were "how to program". I remember the one about Jackson Structured Programming as being particularly useful at the time, and the ones about Oracle databases and tuning SQL have been of generic use since. I'd say both sides were useful, and either in isolation would be a problem. College did not teach me how to manage programs that had more than 100 lines or so of code: version control and documentation were not mentioned. Self-taught and work did not teach me how to analyse an algorithm and tune it.
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
I started at 9 on ZX80s then ZX81 then Spectrums. Fortunately the manuals for the ZX81 and Spectrum were *superb* in terms of teaching you some actual principles (as was a book on Z80 machine code, by, I think, the same author. I have several innante talents that I think helped me immensely then and now. I read ridiculously fast (up to 1100 wpm!)good memory - ideal for fast learning. I have natural facility for languages, an inbuilt drive to spot the patterns/deduce the rules/simplify - a reductionist tendancy, I suppose. Logic comes easy to me, ditto abstraction. I hate repetition and automatically optimise *any* task (at leasts in my head). I come from a family of (numerically talented) engineers, so maybe there's some design/fault finding abilities there (plus we did all our own car maintenance - awfully akin bug fixing). My dad can be extremely pedantic (partly as humour) so I learned to be rather precise in how I phrased things very early... There wasn't much computing at school, I recall by the time there was one Scotvec (bonus points for anyone who recalls those!) in Computing in Engineering, taught by a Techie teacher - by that point I was much better than the poor guy (I recall correcting a flowchart of his to make the algorithm more general/extensible). I did a 4-year BSc, where I learned many many things that I have since forgotten, but started to develop and become very familar with certain prinicples I use to this day - I have been a (Classic) Test Driven Developer since my *2nd* assignment (you can guess how the first went.... almost late and frantic... just like too many real ones). Set logic was invaluable, as was its companion - database design and SQL (Oracle back then). I did Cobol too. (ah, 4-tape master/detail merges - weirdly actually useful in all sorts of odd circumstances since - not with tapes, of course.) The importance of requirements gathering and documentation was drummed in ... By the time I got my first job (Cobol), I was well on the way to having a good foundation - learning particular languages/frameworks takes time as ever, and I had to pick up OO (was 'faking it' it via interfaces and code generators etc since VB4), I suppose that I feel that the time at uni bolstered an innate talent, giving it a framework to hang subsequent knowledge upon. I think it can really make a difference - especially the database stuff - there are so, so many horribly designed ones out there... So, intiailly self taught, educated, learned on the job. Still learning (it never stops) som
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In my opinion (which probably doesn't have that much value) programming is a mindset, not a skill. I did a 3 year qualification in Mechanical Engineering with Design specilisation, and I am now in Financial programming. Not for a minute do I regret doing the Engineering as it tought me how to think. Maths, Engineering etc are all exactly like Programming, same mindset, same approach. Having an education and experience offer you great tools to be more productive and effective, but true programming (Maths, Engineering etc) lies underneath those...
____________________________________________________________ Be brave little warrior, be VERY brave
yeah - there are lots of engineering grads in financial development - it seems a particularly good match.
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yeah - there are lots of engineering grads in financial development - it seems a particularly good match.
yeah, I've seen many professional engineers and finance people being quite comfortable with writing basic code (vba, sql queries etc) as well, the skills require the same mindset and overlap a lot more than most people think
____________________________________________________________ Be brave little warrior, be VERY brave
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yeah, I've seen many professional engineers and finance people being quite comfortable with writing basic code (vba, sql queries etc) as well, the skills require the same mindset and overlap a lot more than most people think
____________________________________________________________ Be brave little warrior, be VERY brave
Best project manager I ever had was an ex-engineer too. Maybe it was no tendancy to try to micro-manage...
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My favorite was being asked to explain what the ol element was in HTML.
Need custom software developed? I do C# development and consulting all over the United States.
If you don't ask questions the answers won't stand in your way.
Doing a job is like selecting a mule, you can't choose just the front half xor the back half so when you ask me to do a job don't expect me to do it half-assed. -
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
Web Architects
Well that alone should clue you in not to even waste time arguing with them. I'll go out on a limb and claim that 90% of the people who use "Web Architect" as a title don't know what the hell they're talking about.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh
Jim Crafton wrote:
Well that alone should clue you in not to even waste time arguing with them. I'll go out on a limb and claim that 90% of the people who use "Web Architect" as a title don't know what the hell they're talking about.
I would just shorten that up a bit to; "...out on a limb and claim that 90% of the people don't know what the hell they're talking about." I think its still true!
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
Self-taught. No other *formal* education. 1) started with batch files in dos 6.0 2) then VB4 in Win 3.1 (it came with 16 and 32 bit compilers! Wow!) 3) HTML / ASP -- all of that before I graduated HS -- 4) RPG IV / SQL 5) C#...etc... All picked up as they came to me at work. I think a person has to have a certain aptitude in order to handle programming well. And, I think that aptitude may extend into other areas as well, for instance I seem to be able to pick up languages well also. My pig latin is blisteringly fast and speaking it in that manner annoys everyone because heytay an'tcay eepkay upway! ^_^ Oh, and that's not to mention the Japanese and French I am currently working on... Like my retired boss told me: 'There are lots of programmers...but there are few good ones.'
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
I always say that I got my education from Barnes & Noble and the Internet. I do have a 2 yr degree in General Education and have always loved computing. I started at age 9 when my Dad gave me a Commodore 64 and I would read him lines of code from magazines to do the silly little programs the authors would put there for you to type endlessly to produce a text based RPG. Programming is a state of mind, its logic and math. My kids often ask what I do all day and I respond..."You know those word problems you hate so much? That's what I do...ALL DAY!". After 13 years of doing this professionally, I can say that I still learn something new everyday. Which in the end keeps me driven. Self taught = taught by others in an informal environment, in my opinion. I have learned a great deal from articles posted here and other great resources on the Web, and I'm man enough to say that I still haven't got it all. Thanks to MSFT, Sun and Oracle we can all continue to learn something new. Be it a new language, design pattern or tool set because they never seem to happy with mediocrity. In the end you either get it or not. Programming is like mixing drinks! Pour how you feel, you can hit it hard and loose and suffer the consequences...just learn from your mistakes.
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I have the fortune of learning from both, University and Self-taught. However, until I had that AHA moment freshman year I did not really get programming. Sure I could do it and follow the steps but the art evaded me and then it clicked. Anyone can program a computer but you can't teach good programming. Unfortunately, it is a hard thing to evaluate. Programming is a very difficult field to level. To this day I still get into heated debates with supposed Web Architects about why you can't write web based systems that rely on file extensions.
Need custom software developed? I do C# development and consulting all over the United States.
If you don't ask questions the answers won't stand in your way.
Doing a job is like selecting a mule, you can't choose just the front half xor the back half so when you ask me to do a job don't expect me to do it half-assed.Right about the AHA moment. :omg: I had that same thing happen, but not until my sophmore year however. I think to be a good programmer, you have to have the knack for problem solving...and that can't be taught. :-D
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
Both. My post secondary education focused less on syntax, and more on methodology, so I was taught to teach myself further skillsets. Syntax is easy- just hit F1 is what to remember for syntax. LOGIC, especially boolean logic, is harder. It helps if you're already pretty much a black and white thinker- thinking in terms of on or off. Ultimately, if-then-else is the most powerful statement to learn in any computer language. Once you've got the syntax of that, you can do anything.
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
In most cases I would go with the intrinsic argument... I took 1 year of Comp Sci, realized that it was just a glorified math class (the lack of female students didn't help either), and switched to political science! Now I have the pleasure of interviewing junior developers to join my ASP.NET team, and I have found, almost without exception, that the computer science grads are utterly clueless in terms of understanding the user experience, and have no idea about web application architecture (they try to make everything so strictly OOP that it takes them three months to build a login module!) I think part of the problem is that Comp Sci programs do not teach practical things like web application development and user interface development and instead focus on the writing of highly optimized algorithms that are not really relevant in a client-server environment, since the delays caused by an inefficient sorting algorithm in this context are totally unnoticeable relative to the very real problem of network latency and inefficient database queries. Maybe its also that the self-taught developers have a personality more suited to the agile development mixed with cowboy coding methodology prevalent in Web 2.0 shops... you've got to be a pretty rigid thinker to make it through the tedium of Big-O and other such computer science concepts. Interesting, the one exception is the director of my department, who got his Comp Sci degree but far prefers doing creative stuff like wireframing and user experience architecture than writing code at all.
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On my way to work today, I was thinking about my development as a programmer. I do have post-secondary education in the field, but, I think what I was taught there was more of the syntax of a language than how to program itself. With that thought in mind, I would describe myself as self-taught. As an example of being completely taught a skill, my oldest brother is a meat cutter by trade. He was taught his skillset by our father and then refined his skillset by attending college. How would you describe yourself in this regard? Tim
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A combination of environment and self-teaching is what develops a good programmer. I have seen people in some good projects dealing with latest and greatest but with no desire to learn on their own by going beyond 9-5. They did not become good programmers. On the other hand I have seen brilliant self-taught programmers however they could not progress beyond because they were not in the right environment with right guidance. They are some things which you can only learn from experience by being in the right environment: writing and designing production style code is one of them. I always considered myself a great programmer till I started interacting with customers. A frog who lives in a well can become a master of his dominion (the well). He can know all there is abut the well but if he constrains himself to the well he will never know about the lake, the river and the ocean.