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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Programming is notorious for tutorial hell. One of the reasons for this is that not enough care is taken to differentiate the act of programming vs its applications. An analogue I can think of is that math is a tool, its used in Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, etc. Similarly programming is a tool its used in Physics, Engineering, Web development, etc. However, a lot of tutorials for some weird reason try to sneak in some Physics, Engineering, Web development (not literally) teaching along with the programming. This makes a beginner come away with the impression that the task of learning to program is much more onerous than it actually is. A lot of people would be put off by math as well if Calculus courses had some physics, engineering and biology in it.

So firstly, be clear in what you want to learn. Do you want to learn only programming? Or programming for some kind application? You would only do yourself favors if the programming and the programming relating to the application is well delineated, at least while you are learning and not informed enough to not get overwhelmed.

My suggestion to you based on;

At one point I went back to learning some R and python without having the fundamentals (I guess the academic version of a script kiddie) purely for doing genome sequencing/scRNA-seq work.

  • First get familiar with the act of programming.

    • Choose one language and get good at it. Python is a no-brainer for beginners in general. And especially for the type of work you have to do. Just stick with python, no R for now, until you are not thinking in syntax anymore.

    • I suggest you watch this video and learn everything covered in this video. This video is far from comprehensive. It's far from perfect. But the point is to stick to something at all to begin with! This video will give you the ABC's of python. You can learn the how to write poems and novels later.

    • Once you are comfortable enough with the basic syntax of your first language that you don't have to check the correct syntax over and over again. Start doing some practice problems. There are hundreds of resources for this. LeetCode is an (in)famouse resource. However, be warned that even the "Easy" problems are difficult a beginner. These problems are meant to be tests of computer science application, so if you find them too hard, here are some easier ones. The objective here is to build for lack of better words "muscle memory".

    • Optional step. Once you are comfortable doing at least leetcode medium. You can read up a book on "Data structures and algorithms" or any such books on how to write better code. But I don't think these are necessary for non software engineers.

  • Familiarize yourself with the tools of your trade within your programming language of choice.

    • This means learning how to use specific libraries related to your field. You will have an easier time picking these up if you are already a good programmer. A reason non software engineers (especially scientists and researchers !!) write such terrible code is because they learn the requisite libraries needed for their work before becoming even half decent at programming.

  • Do a project(s) of your own. This is good for soo many reasons. And is an order not a prescription.

    • Self motivating.

    • You will be tested on applying what you know

    • Most in line with real world work

    • Will force you to learn new things yourself via forum posts and documentation scouring, which is an essential skill in programming, despite not being related to it in any way.

    • Rewarding.

You do the above long enough, some of it concurrently and you will reach a point where you can just program. You don't think in syntax anymore, all languages will be the same. For example I can start writing in a new language within 30minutes - 1 hours of looking at it, because I already know what arrays, conditions and loops are; The syntax is superficial to a programmer, But to achieve that, you need to first master ONE language. Your ultimate goal is to understand the meaning not the teachers (compilers) password.

CS50x is good all things considered. For your needs I might suggest CS50p. But ideally you can pretty much learn programming without courses at all.

Thanks for the reply! Sorry, I was away all weekend. I'll take a crack at it.

So firstly, be clear in what you want to learn. Do you want to learn only programming? Or programming for some kind application?

Unfortunately, I think my final goals will be determined more by how much time I can carve out of the rest of my life for it rather than starting with some endpoint in mind. I'm fairly confident I never want to actually be writing the nitty-gritty code that analyzes bio data, but rather am looking for synergy with what I already know. I think at the far end if I ever end up running a bio startup incorporating machine learning it might be fun to mess around with in the beginning stages, or at the very least, be able to converse intelligently with the engineers involved. Bootstrapping a bio startup in my basement is much harder; you can do some bacterial and yeast work (probably illegally in a few different ways) for something in the range of thousands of dollars, but doing anything with mammalian cells would probably be in the 100k range just for capital costs and be more or less impossible to hide.

Anyways, that's where I'm at. I'll give those resources a try and maybe recalibrate my goals over the next few months.

I'd add reading other people's code. I picked up a lot of coding by osmosis as a kid just fumbling around existing codebases, just trying to get a program to do something I wanted. I literally had no idea what is a for loop or what are function calls, I just dived in and tweaked it. Of course it works better the more background knowledge you have. But the main point is to se real code, instead of the idealized stuff that a lot of courses teach, eg "design patterns" just for the sake of design pattern, unrealistic standards of code cleanness, like the very opinionated Clean Code etc. The best open source products from respected companies don't code like that, but get shit done. I'm not advocating for spaghetti code, just to get a taste for real, working codebases as opposed to toy examples with unrealistic elegance. By reading code you can pick up good or bad habits alike, but that's not a reason to avoid it.

I would put this into the "things that you probably should do" bin. Issue being there are a thousand things like this to be done. Read forums. immerse yourself in the culture, read open source code, read new papers coming out, read documentation for fun, etc.

It leads back to your initial point, motivation. Those who are motivated will naturally do all of those things out of curiosity. But I am not sold on the idea that making someone uninterested do those things will make them good. Nonetheless, reading other peoples code does have high returns relative to "things you should probably do aswell".

Also we don't demand this from Engineers or any other profession (maybe barring doctors). Electrical engineers are not prescribed looking at other engineers schematics in their free time (even if it made them better Engineers). Programming is in this weird zone where its not standardized enough that only the most passionate of autists are the ones who make it through all the hoops.

making someone uninterested do those things will make them good

Someone who is uninterested will never become good anyway, so you might as well encourage them to do these things and find out if they are or not. I have worked 25 years in this industry and never met a developer I respected who was not in love with it.

Well, maybe those professions are being held back then. But electrical engineers are close enough to programmers in culture, I'd say. Or at least they are in my bubble. And as for other engineers, there's less of an open culture and things are proprietary. Realistic projects can only be done on the company scale in industry, there no equivalent of free software or Github for those professions.

Also,I don't think that other professions are really as straightforward and standardized as these conversations make it seem. Programming isn't sooo unique. Generic IT admin stuff or network engineering, infrastructure design etc also has a lot of the same difficulties. And someone who mucks around their home router and built some PCs as a kid will be better at such IT work. You'll be a better car mechanic if you're in some car modding community since growing up. You'll be better at roofing, construction planning, flooring, plumbing design etc if you dive into it obsessively. People just don't do it that much for whatever reason.

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