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Comment by namelosw | Hacker News Reader

'Polished' might be an result of large population of audience.

If we take an example from programming:

A fundamental Python or JavaScript course would have massive audiences. As a result, some of the video author would made money from their videos and then keep polishing the videos.

In contrast, a in depth video guide on how to prove theorems in Coq would be very lucky if they have 10 audience...

Not like the Olympic games or video games, where professionals' performance are pleasant to behold. The problem of 'How to' video is it encourages shallow information because the real professionals' work are either too arcane or too boring for the audience.

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I never understood why anyone in their right mind would want to learn programming through a video course. Programming languages are inherently text based, why wouldn't you rather read a denser tutorial or book than have someone spoonfeed you at a pace that's often either too slow or too fast and doesn't easily allow you to reread or skip sections.

Because if you sit me in front of a dense book of text I'm going to read the same line 3 times over before noticing and the information still wouldn't have gone in.

Different people learn in different ways.

I have to agree with the OP, if something is primarily text oriented then it probably is more efficient to learn it using a great deal of text. The whole learning styles thing is not really something that should be perpetuated:

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-...

Motivation and styles is probably a different matter. There is the problem that self motivated learners can only learn if they are motivated, but also that they can be led astray by materials that primarily motivate and entertain.

I wonder whether the point is more to do with memory. If you can show a person remembers more from watching an instructor code out an example on screen compared to reading a text based tutorial, and they spend the same time doing both, then it may follow that it's more efficient for that individual to learn in a non-text based manner.

In practice, I wonder whether this non-text based learning is more useful in the earlier stages of learning to write code. This might because your learning much more than how to write a valid set of lines that compile to an expected result, there's a lot about style, motivation and norms that you have to soak up too. A lot of that is often implicit in text based tutorials, whereas the video based format makes many minor details explicit (e.g. seeing someone type a line of code wrong, and then explain, 'oh yeah this is a commmon mistake'... this actually encodes a lot of information a text based tutorial would typically miss)

I have to agree, for example, there are many things about programming and getting a non-academic job that I have learned from watching programming videos and many things at a higher academic level or for contributing to a codebase that I have learned from skills picked up from texts and working with text based documentation. The problem I see with the a focus on learning styles for individuals is that they add additional layers of complexity and ultimately more ethical failures by claiming with little or no proof that different learners have vastly different capabilities in a whole bunch of categories that are innate rather than a matter of practice.

Given that subjects have inherent styles of medium that become more essential as you approach expert and need to interact with experts in an efficient way, if you convince someone they have an innate problem you deprive them of the motivation to become an expert, and you see more and more people going to a junior level and dropping out.

Words are text oriented but if you’re learning the word “blue”, text isn’t going to help you a whole lot. It’ll help you spell it and recognize the word, but it won’t help you understand what the color means nearly as well as a video which shows the word but also several images of blue things.

I’m not at all convinced that programming is primarily text oriented in any case. The underlying concepts are mathematical and logical, not textual. People don’t learn through text or video. Those are mediums. They learn through metaphor and relationships.

So the question is which medium gets those metaphors across most efficiently. Consider, for instance, a binary tree. It’s a metaphor. And I’d be willing to bet most people new to the topic would learn that metaphor better (or at least faster) with a person drawing out a tree and pointing to the path a program would take to add/remove/list/etc. the nodes on the tree than they would seeing a block of code and having someone explain it in text.

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