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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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However, I would go a step ahead and say that a very specific type of intelligence that probably correlates with IQ score, but is distinct is along certain dimensions could be a better predictor of programming ability. See Dehnadis work.

Caveat: at least some parts of the Dehnadi writeup in "Camel Has Two Humps" were retracted, although mostly summary-side rather than . This doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong in the broad strokes -- but it does undermine the specific test he used.

I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method. More on this later.

I think there are benefits and costs to each approach, but I've largely emphasized the "impart intuition" approach to start, and then blending in knowledge focuses as time goes on. The failure modes of "imparting knowledge" are less obvious, especially in a classroom where most problems can be reduced into knowledge questions (tests) or can have their intuition components avoided or solved by one or two members of a full classroom (long-term projects). But the larger understanding about problems as things that need to and can be resolved internally instead of by repetition is especially important in computer programming.

More seriously, knowledge-focused studies are not merely less interesting to most new students, but they're also specialized to specific environments. They're important! There are a lot of problems that can arise if you see compsci as solely solving problems, not just in the bad practices sense but actively developing wildly non-performant or unsafe code unknowingly. But there's a lot of people come out of colleges with incredibly in-depth knowledge of Linked Lists, but not a) to avoid using them outside of a job interview, and b) how to learn how to handle the garbage collector for their current language of choice.

I really don't want to do women dirty like this but, I have yet to come across a "good" female programmer. I really don't know what it is at the root of this. My superficial intuition is that a certain aspect of becoming a good programmer is just relentlessness.

I know a good few (including cis), albeit generally more at the enthusiast level rather than as a career. I think it's less common, but that's plausibly social, plausibly preferring people-focused relentlessness, plausibly downstream of having the background, or plausibly just not having the sort of near-autistic 'not letting this go' aspect.

But the larger understanding about problems as things that need to and can be resolved internally instead of by repetition is especially important in computer programming.

I agree with this. Most of being good at coding rests on your ability to detect hidden abstractions in the business logic you're writing-- subtle regularities in the domain that can be used to write easier-to-understand and easier-to-modify code.

There's this saying: "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall be continued to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." I think that's saying something basically similar, and I think it's true.

But trying to teach how to do that seems basically similar to trying to teach someone generic problem solving, which professional educators have been banging their heads against forever.

Yes, finding these hidden abstractions feels like "reverse engineering" to me, which in software could be broadly defined as: "determining business rules from code."

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