Comment by cammikebrown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cammikebrown | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Aw, man. This essay gives me some perspective. I ended up hating physics by the time I got my bachelor’s in it. I remember junior year they said, we know you’re confused, you haven’t actually learned REAL physics yet, that’s what grad school is for. And most of you won’t be accepted, and of those who are, most won’t become professors even if you want to.

I figured a physics degree would allow me to get a good job, but then they said, sure, if you want to do finance, defense, or education. What?! The first two were pretty nauseating so I decided to do a year-long internship at various local public schools, and realized that I hated that too. (More the bureaucracy than the actual teaching aspect.) My school basically expected you’d double major in math or CS, so they often didn’t teach a lot of the fundamental techniques you needed, assuming you knew it already. I also learned that while my high school had done a great job teaching me English and history, the math department was not quite up to snuff comparatively, and I felt behind my classmates about “fundamentals” like linear algebra, which they had somehow been taught in high school. Sure, I knew Shakespeare a lot better than them, and even minored in literature in college (maybe biting off more than I could chew) but that clearly didn’t impress them. Why waste your time with old books when you could be making money! It definitely brought me down a notch and made me feel dumb, but I also realized college wasn’t a place for someone to learn lots of different things, but to focus on one area instead. I ended up becoming a bartender and I’m very happy with that decision. At least, once things are back to normal, hopefully within the next few months. Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it

I look back on college, and so many classes seemed like a waste of time. I understand a well rounded education, but so many classes seemed like fluff. I once took a Abnormal Psychology class. It sounded interesting being premed. For half a year we sat in a circle, and talked about feelings. I was so shy that was the last place I would open up. I used to think, If I was honest, I would admit I was still a virgin, and had a deathly fear of public speaking. I loved the teacher though. She really meant well.

If I had a kid, I would supplement his education. I would make sure he knew mathematics well. I also think physics should be taught much earlier, along with the finance, and the markets. As a kid, I was interested in woodworking, cars, engines, even electricity, but the teachers had us coloring world maps?

Counterpoint: some of the weird classes I took in high school / college ended up being useful, or at least more useful than some of my core CS classes.

I took a Psychology class in high school, and now I understand why people feel and react certain ways, because I can connect back to the concepts I learned. I took a music theory class in college, which is helping me make my own music as a hobby, and also appreciate some songs.

In contrast, I am researching programming languages in graduate school, I took an undergrad class on PL, and it barely taught me anything I didn't already know.

Bottom line is: we need a system to teach people more things that will probably end up useful and less obscure crap, but it isn't just "teach people whatever their job is and whatever they need to know as an adult, and ignore the social sciences and history because those will never be useful".

I'll add my own bit:

Best class I ever took was Dinosaur Natural History. A fluff class if there ever was one, but very hard to get a seat in. I really loved the class, but thought it would never really add anything to my life. Because, well, Rexy has been dead a while.

I was so wrong.

What I learned in the class was mostly the applied basics of biology, geology, and evolution. And presented in such a fun way, I gobbled it all up. Those basics later lead me to a successful career in bioengineering and a dalliance in carbon geology.

Like I said, best class I ever took.

I went to a small liberal arts school (Ursinus) outside of Philly, who I only mention because it was unique in that part of getting your degree required taking CIE, or "Common Intellectual Experience" classes. Freshmen were required to take CIE I and CIE II, and the classes were scheduled such that it not only tried to mix students up between different disciplines, but they were also taught by faculty from every department, just as much a requirement for them as for the students.

The classes focused primarily on classic texts, literature, philosophy, all the big religious works, etc. The point, really, was to foster discussion and to get everyone on an even playing field their first two semesters in terms of intellectual discussion, and really picking apart what you're reading, preparing you for the world of research in academia.

A key point here is that I don't know a single person, student or faculty, who didn't feel that CIE was extremely worthwhile set of classes, and a pivotal part of our time there.

That said, after I & II, there were CIE III classes that would satisfy different electives. One of the best classes I took was CIE III - Capitalism and Democracy. It was taught by one of my math professors, a man I deeply respected and learned a ton from, and I was one of only four students in the class.

The semester was basically split up into 5 or 6 chunks, where each chunk took two countries whose basis of government encompassed (even if it was stretch), capitalistic and democratic ideas. So, we'd read papers and book excerpts from economists and political theorists (think Adam Smith, Keynes, Friedman), along with summaries of the countries, and each chunk culminated in a report comparing the two countries implementations of capitalism and democracy, trying to find the intertwining of the axioms laid down by the theorists, and how those two systems of governance and economics evolved in different political spectrums.

I was a math and comp sci double major, and am a firmware engineer today, and never dipped my toes anywhere near economics or anything politically related before or after that class, but it's really stuck with me after all these years.

> Bottom line is: we need a system to teach people more things that will probably end up useful and less obscure crap, but it isn't just "teach people whatever their job is and whatever they need to know as an adult, and ignore the social sciences and history because those will never be useful".

I agree with you here, and mostly because we all exist and make decisions in a historical, experiential, and psychological context, and you have to have some knowledge of contexts that are different from yours if you are to have any hope of being an effective leader.

> As a kid, I was interested in woodworking, cars, engines, even electricity, but the teachers had us coloring world maps?

Wait until you read this [0] [1]

[0] https://www.city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-el...

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/new-course-outlin...

As Matt Yglesias put it, the first article makes 0 sense. If they don't like what the school is teaching them, pull their kids out! Isn't that the whole point of private school? It's a choice to go there.

Care to give a little bit more context?

It's amazing how conservatives write love letters about the "free market" but despise absolutely anyone in this "free market" who do not follow conservative orthodoxy.

It's a PRIVATE SCHOOL! Send your kids elsewhere if they don't teach the kids enough Ayn Rand and Michelle Malkin!

None of these conservatives seemed to give a shit 15 years ago when rural PUBLIC schools like mine were teaching anti-science creationism, or historical revisionism in the Lost Cause/Civil War apologia. Many were shrieking their heads off if their kids weren't taught such utter bullshit.

I agree that we should teach math earlier, in elementary school the same math (fractions, percentages) were literally taught repeatedly from 3rd-6th grade. I would have loved to learn some algebra instead. The concept of doing the same thing to both sides of an equation to solve for an unknown is not terribly difficult to grasp.

As for finance, I’d rather be coloring world maps. It’s given me a great desire to travel the world. Finance makes my stomach hurt. Then again, I’m poor, so what do I know? I agree we should be taught more about it than we usually are, which is that we aren’t taught anything at all about it.

I remember learning algebra between 3rd and 6th grade. It was hidden within word problems, but 7 was exponents and everything after had a Cartesian plane

Your last statement reminds me of this rather brutal take on the US's (and really the whole world's) educational systems, reposted to HN a few days ago: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html.

The main idea is that if you look past the things we're told that school is meant to be for, school is pretty clearly meant to turn humans into compliant drones.

Relevant Calvin and Hobbes:

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/03/14

> I look back on college, and so many classes seemed like a waste of time. I understand a well rounded education, but so many classes seemed like fluff.

Even though I believe well rounded interests are important, I felt the same way as you when it came to the distribution requirements. For the most part, people took first year courses that were more about rote memorization than depth of understanding because they were easy. Some university departments even offered special courses that watered things down even further.

For the most part, it was a good experience. Things were more lively when a room had a mixture of Science and English/History majors, but that only happened because a few of us were willing to go onto second and third year courses outside of our major. On the other hand, it did feel like it was setting us back relative to those who stuck to the easy course in order to focus upon their major.

>>> My school basically expected you’d double major in math or CS, so they often didn’t teach a lot of the fundamental techniques you needed, assuming you knew it already.

Indeed, it was some decades ago, but at my college, there was substantial overlap between the requirements for the math and physics majors, to the point where just a few additional credits got you both. And it was a time when CS was still being taught in math departments at some colleges, so there were courses that you could take for either CS or math credit.

I actually came from the other direction, started as a math major and added physics, which I then studied in grad school.

In my view the affinity between physics and programming (and electronics) is no accident. Physics was computational before the computer age. We ran out of problems that could be solved in "closed" form, early in the 20th century. The Manhattan Project employed a staff of "computers" who performed calculations on mechanical calculators and punch card machines. Scientific programming predates the software industry. Today, virtually every scientific instrument is computerized, every experiment is automated. My PhD thesis experiment ran on thousands of lines of code.

Every physics student learned to program. What they didn't do is pay attention to turning us necessarily into good programmers. Since I didn't take any CS courses, I had to pick that stuff up on my own, and have continued working on improving my programming technique to this day.

> My school basically expected you’d double major in math or CS

Coding knowledge is becoming a matter of literacy for more and more professions, so it might be worth trying to pick up a bit of it before it's too late - lockdown might be an especially good time.

I'm nearly 32, I took introductory coding classes and got straight As but I can't seem to get past more complicated projects. I'm not sure if my brain is wired for it, I have a very hard time finding bugs that are sitting right in front of me, and thinking about loops for too long makes my head hurt. I've certainly tried, I'm considering getting a Mac for dev because Windows is so painful to try and learn any coding. Seriously, I'll copy and paste stuff and it just won't run or it'll give an error on Windows, every single time.

> Seriously, I'll copy and paste stuff and it just won't run or it'll give an error on Windows, every single time.

I've had this as well, in part it's because I don't know PowerShell / CMD that well. I'd go for Mac, I did it and never looked back. Buy the new M1 Mac Mini even, if you have the spare money.

> I'm not sure if my brain is wired for it,

I've thought about this question as my brain partially isn't and learned a thing or two on how to overcome it.

My issues:

1. Being detail oriented isn't my strong suit.

2. For a long time I wasn't able to grok it.

3. I have hard time visualizing code.

My solutions:

1. Use all kinds of tools that will kill the detail. Simple things like syntax highlighers and linters are a given. The most bang for buck was when I learned how to use a debugger, that was almost 10 years ago.

2. Follow a computer systems course like NAND2Tetris and after that hack computers at hackthebox.eu (especially the x86-64 assembly challenges). By understanding the internals of how computers work at a systems level, you essentially are capable of grokking a lot more. Take a compilers course while you're at it, I failed mine, but learned a lot from it anyway that helped to grok more stuff.

3. Debuggers help here as well, practicing pure math helps (I'm not good at that either) and simply doing data structure and algorithm exercises help.

---

I've learned over time that making a statement like "my brain isn't wired for it" isn't helping. In part this is because it isn't true, what I was lacking was a certain perspective that comes quicker to some people. For me, it took some time, but now I have it :)

You're right about the last bit, I'm really frustrated by people who say "Math isn't for me!" because for me, I love math, as long as I have a good teacher. If I have a bad teacher, though, which isn't uncommon, it's a nightmare. I can't learn higher-level math when it's just a series of proof, corollary, lemma, whatever, without any motivation. I have trouble picking what things I want to study with CS, because it's all interesting. Too much breadth, not enough depth. I still haven't figured what's best for me. I probably have ADHD but haven't taken any medicine for it; maybe that'd help. I trip over the details and I know I'll get it if I keep at it but I have to keep looking up syntax and it drives me crazy. I've liked Python because of the simplicity. But then I want to learn the nitty gritty of architecture and systems programming, and people tell me not to waste my time and focus on the higher-level stuff.

Nand2Tetris is really great, but you have to be a reasonably accomplished programmer before you take it on.

I disagree here. Being able to use gdb makes things easier. I had 2 programming courses under my belt after taking a computer systems course.

People make it more difficult in their minds than it is. The key tricks being: one step at a time, use a debugger and google everyday assembly instruction that you encounter.

I’ll give you this: studying computer systems made me a better programmer.

Late reply, but gdb wouldn’t be used in nand2tetris. Their online grading system accepts only a couple of high level languages. I used Python to write the assembler and compilers.

What I was trying to say in my previous comment was that one would not want to be a raw beginner when starting nand2tetris. One would need to be thoroughly familiar with basic Python data structures. I used lists, dicts, and a class I wrote to handle the AST nodes.

I’d recommend nand2tetris before taking a full compiler course.

We’re agreed that low level understanding is very helpful. And, it’s interesting.

I'm more than twice your age, and I can say that Windows is the worst coding environment there is.

If you just want to learn to do software, but don't want to dig into computers per se, then a cheap Mac is a good choice.

If you do want to learn software and computers, then use Linux. You can install it on most any old PC or laptop you have or can scrounge. Learn how to admin the box. It's an important skill for experimental physics and engineering physics these days.

And try Julia:

julialang.org Use the Pluto interface.

https://computationalthinking.mit.edu/Spring21/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/mit-were-building-on-julia-pro...

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3314221.3314642 (the paper is rather hairy, if you are new to this stuff.)

With your background in physics and humanities (he can write!) plus Linux and Julia, many doors should open.

Windows is not a coding environment, Visual Studio is. And it’s one of the best.

I work in all three. Windows is the worst as a general development platform, in my opinion.

And Visual Studio is not a good choice for a beginner. It's too complex.

Can I ask what languages/tools you've tried to learn? (Hopefully nothing complicated like C++?) If you have a link to something you followed that confused you in the past, I'd be happy to see if I can pinpoint the issue and suggest an alternative. A lot of tutorials, courses, etc. definitely do assume Linux/Mac, so they're painful on Windows. And conversely if you find a Windows-based one, you'll find it painful on other platforms. It's really important to pick something with less friction so you can focus on the concepts initially.

That's the other thing. Pretty much every tutorial I find is front-end web development, which I understand is most of what we interact with on a computer, but not especially appealing to me (fiddling with CSS doesn't feel like programming). The intro classes I took were Java, IDL (computational astrophysics, learning to solve ODEs) and also Javascript via HTML5 Canvas (a really fun class on chaos theory and fractal art). I got all As and thought it was easy. Beyond that, learning on my own, it got really hard really fast and I didn't know what to do.

I'm interested in iOS app development but that requires a Mac. I'm probably gonna grab an M1 Mac Mini.

I've tried CS50, got most of the way through it but it's tough to be motivated by self-guided courses when I'm not forced to do it. I was able to do the first week or so of Advent of Code before it got way too tough. I love self learning mostly, but for programming it did help to have lectures, grades, and office hours. I have choice paralysis where I just dabble in all sorts of things and don't know what to commit to.

If there's any programming-adjacent technology that is practically guaranteed to make you want to pull your hair out, it's CSS :-) I don't find web dev appealing in general either, so lots of sympathies there.

It's nice that you've tried Java and computational stuff and found those more appealing. Re: CS50, my understanding is that while the course is well-structured, they do start with C, which is better suited for people who really like learning from the "bottom up", rather than those who learn better "top-down". You might be in the latter group.

If all that sounds about accurate, it's probably better to focus on courses that start with higher-level technologies like Python, C#, or Java in the beginning (but stay away from web dev). Python is the most likely to feel "natural", so that's what I recommend to people just starting out. You could check out Berkeley's CS 61A for example (though I think MIT/Harvard have Python-based courses too). If you stayed on Windows, I'd recommend Visual Studio 2019 (not to be confused with Visual Studio Code), since it has everything well-integrated together. But courses focus on UNIX-based tools, so you'd indeed want a Mac if you're following anything that uses the terminal. And if iOS app development is your goal then you definitely don't want to go with Windows, though I don't have any experience with that so I can't give you pointers (hah) there.

CS in general isn't about just coding though; the algorithms and data structures are extremely important, and they aren't necessarily easy to pick up, so that's normal. And self-guided courses in general definitely need a lot of motivation, and that's easier said than done for most people, so don't feel like it's just you. You probably want to pick something where you have a good dose of interest & curiosity to drive yourself instead of just relying on the course, regardless of what you're doing.

Not sure how helpful this is but best of luck trying it with a Mac!

> I've certainly tried, I'm considering getting a Mac for dev because Windows is so painful to try and learn any coding

As a happy Mac user for many years, I agree it is worth it. However, in case you aren't ready to spend the money just yet, you can start by dual booting your PC to switch between Windows and Ubuntu or other Linux distro.

It takes time. I have been developing software for more than a decade now and I am still learning a lot of things that seem to be basic.

Your knowledge and experience will increase linearly.

Mac would definitely be my choice.

It's highly unlikely any of your problems have anything to do with working from Windows. You're likely to experience the same problems on MacOS.

Yep, you can learn programming in any OS. (OS is mostly orthogonal to programming itself really.) Especially if you are using something popular like Python that is available for almost any platform.

It may take you up to ten years to know what you are doing (not counting the time you might want to spend reading Knuth).

My friend figured this out and pivoted to a CS degree. Then got both because it was only another semester of classes.

My physics program had zero programming requirements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com