Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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What do you mean by "opportunity"?

If you were unfortunate enough to attend a school that didn't have any sort of computing classes, after school groups, etc, or you lived somewhere rural that didn't have those programmes outside of school then you would have had no access to a mentor who can guide you.

If they have 3 months to go to a camp, surely they could as well learn at home for those 3 months.

In order to learn on your own you need some knowledge to start with. If you sit down in front of a computer with zero knowledge of a subject then you don't even know what to put in to Google, and if you start with a search like "how to code" you have no way to assess whether the websites you find are actually useful or a waste of time.

Languages like Scratch can teach someone to code when they have no external input. They might teach "bad" ideas, but those can be unlearned and replaced with better concepts later. Most of us learned by starting with something like BASIC and have gone on to learn better techniques. There's no reason why someone learning today has to start with a "good" language like Python.

Heck, I started with Visual Basic 6. That's was far worse than Scratch as far as teaching bad practices go.

> If you were unfortunate enough to attend a school that didn't have any sort of computing classes, after school groups, etc, or you lived somewhere rural that didn't have those programmes outside of school then you would have had no access to a mentor who can guide you.

I grew up in a small Greek village at a time when very few people knew what a computer was. My first exposure to programming was finding a CD with all sorts of things in it, including Visual Basic 4. I had no internet, so literally the only thing I had to go on was the VB language reference (the reference, as in, this function does that), and a two-page tutorial on making a temperature converter.

I taught myself programming using just that reference and tutorial, and nothing else. I don't believe courses are necessary if you want to learn programming.

I don't believe courses are necessary if you want to learn programming.

You're wrong. There are lots of developers who are self-taught, and just like you they didn't need a course. That's awesome. Similarly though there are lots of other developers who aren't self-taught, and for whom the process of how to think about code didn't "click" with them until they were taught the basics. Those developers needed a course.

People aren't all the same, so what works for one person won't necessarily work for another, and given the number of developers society will need in the future we will have to afford opportunities to every type of learner.

>> given the number of developers society will need in the future

It really is 1999 all over again. :-( :-)

Be careful when projecting your experiences onto others.

I would be very surprised if you honestly can't conceive of people who would struggle immensely to teach themselves the way you did. Or even if they could succeed in doing so, that it might take too long or be too financially risky.

I personally know plenty of people like that. Some of them are very intelligent as well.

People are reading more into my comment than what I said. The GP said you can't learn to program without a mentor or access to resources, and I suggested that you can, to which he both agreed and disagreed.

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