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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Jeff closes with the following words IN BOLD:

“The act of programming seems literally unteachable to a sizable subset of incoming computer science students”

There is, of course, an alternate explanation:

“We in Universities seem literally incapable of teaching programming to a sizable subset of incoming computer science students”

Experiments going back to the 1980s with teaching children how to program using Lego blocks and robots with Logo seem to indicate that nearly everyone can learn how to program, but possibly not when they’re 18 or 19 and possibly not with the kind of academic environment represented by the test.

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> Experiments going back to the 1980s with teaching children how to program using Lego blocks and robots with Logo seem to indicate that nearly everyone can learn how to program, but possibly not when they’re 18 or 19 and possibly not with the kind of academic environment represented by the test.

I only learned how to program at around age 20 or 21, but at that point I had already been a CS student for 2 years, and of course had failed most of the actual programming-related classes (even though I had earned a A+ in calculus, with congratulations from the professor). I am now a professional programmer, I'm in my early 30s, and as such I'll quickly write down my thoughts on this, maybe it helps someone make some sense of it.

Now, about the particular example in the article, I can still remember the first programming class during my first semester at Uni. I can still remember about how baffled I was when seeing almost the exact same code as in the above article, I was wondering to myself: "assignment works left to right, is the only natural way, what do you mean now "a has the value of b"? You first write down a, the 'equal' sign, and then b, it's only normal that b, coming at the end, takes the value of a". And so on. Someone also mentioned the "competitive" nature of a CS-class, which is 100% spot-on. I had never owned a computer during high-school, while some of the my then-colleagues had been programming for 10 years already, and because of that I was afraid to ask questions or even to ask for help from my colleagues.

And in case you're wondering how did I finally became a programmer, well, it was thanks to Python. At first I started writing some ugly scripts in PHP, but after 6 months I stumbled upon Python. I don't know exactly why, but it's something about this language that makes it very easy for non-programmers to grasp programming language concepts. After one year of doing Python I finally had the balls to try and take my most difficult programming class again. I got an A (the class was taught using the C programming language), with the professor surprised about how had I managed to do that.

I think Python's a great language to start with, maybe. What turned me on to PHP and web programming is that I could do things easily and get visual results back. Flask is a better way to build server side apps than raw PHP, but it hides a lot and a significant part of the Python language needs to be understood to understand a lot of it.

I spent a year learning about website design shortly after turning 14 and during that time eventually came across PHP. For about another year until 10th grade started, I kept doing simple PHP sites. I had looked at Python once and felt kind of offended by it, and I didn't understand OOP. "Why do I have to do mystr.split(' ') instead of explode(' ', $mystr)?" "Why don't variables have sigils?" "What's this import crap?" "Why do I have to have indentation?" (I commonly didn't indent my PHP code during this time.) I also used Windows. I still hate cmd.exe.

I took the AP CS course in 10th grade, and Java forced me to at least partially understand OOP and why it may be useful or cool. (We also did everything on a Mandrake Linux computer.) I looked at Python again about midway through the year and started loving it (I was in the habit of indenting with one space at that point since the teacher required at least some indentation so Python's forced indentation didn't bug me anymore). After several months in Python I began to understand that real OOP went far beyond what Java supported. Now that I'm 21 Python is still my favorite language, but I do really like Clojure.

So I still think Python is a perfect beginner's language, but I'm not entirely convinced that Python as Python is enough to spark an interest to go do your own thing. The first thing I reached for when I learned Python well enough to do anything was video game programming. Making interactive applications that aren't limited to the terminal held my interest a lot more back then.

(My CS teacher also resolved many difficulties with the = sign by always reading code like "a = b" as "a gets b". Some people have trouble enough with homonyms in language, seeing the '=' mean something completely different to what they've been used to for 10 years can be startling.)

'My CS teacher also resolved many difficulties with the = sign by always reading code like "a = b" as "a gets b"'

This is one of the great things about Pascal. The := sign is used for assignment, and the equals sign alone is used for equality. It's very natural to call := 'gets' and keep a clear distinction between assertions and assignments.

I totally agree, := should be used more. (More than once I've had (define := define) in my personal Scheme code.) Unfortunately my enthusiasm in the past has been met with the quip "Any language that uses := as the assignment operator inevitably dooms itself to never becoming more popular than Pascal." Not many people care anymore. (They did at one point; a lot of 80s and some 90s C code is so macro'd up it looks a lot like a dialect of BASIC.)

Methinks age is the most important factor here.

We teach children the basics skills needed for most studies well before that age. Reading, writing, math etc. You can't expect someone to successfully study literature if they don't know how to read.

Programming is a skill, not just a matter of knowledge, and the foundations for that skill must be laid at an earlier age. Most skills we learn after that are just extensions of those basic skills.

I'm not sure about the current generation, but in my age group (40+), everyone who programs started in their early teens.

I don't think age is as big a factor as you make it. I learned how to program at about 19 and got right into without any previous programming experience. If programming is indeed a skill, then why can't someone learn it at any age? My father, in his early 50s, is learning the skill of "debugging" his iPad when he needs to do something; instead of calling me, he's starting to use forums and search engines to find his answer. I would consider that a skill, yet he's learning it without having any computer experience at all.

What basic skills are the foundations for programming? Abstract thought? Deductive reasoning? Maybe someone is more inclined towards programming versus some other field, but I believe everyone has— at any age— the ability to learn how to program, much like everyone has the ability to learn a new spoken language at any age.

I think you have got it right. I would love to think that I am fairly special in my ability to write software, but I hesitate to believe that people cannot learn something.

Its more likely that people are being taught the wrong way, rather then the idea that lacking a natural aptitude for programming you don't have a chance.

This article seems to touch on the explanation a bit more.

http://www.bricklin.com/wontprogram.htm

It's not that Johnny can't program, it's just that he won't.

I saw a pre-intro programming class that took people who would otherwise have been in the sheep category and led them to succeed at the rate as those already coming in with successful backgrounds.

If we know that the problem is a lack of a consistent mental model, the solution is to learn how to teach adults to have a consistent mental model, not to throw up our hands as these researchers seem to do. To me this study suggests we aren't teaching the important skills necessary to program. We may need the equivalent of Drawing With The Right Side of the Brain for code.

After all, a 22% failure rate is still pretty pathetic.

I would counter-counter that there practically no teacher that can teach. Elementary & high school math teachers deliver a lot of practice, but that ultimately they really just aim to "teach" the kids who naturally understand math. The rest just stumble along and the system covers it up. The same is true for English, History, Phys Ed and pretty much everything.

I don't think the same is true for everything, but I do think this is the case in a fair bit of Math classrooms. I've tutored both a friend (same age) and his his younger sister (5 years younger) and they both struggled with the same exact concepts. Granted, you could say it was genetics, but after some creative examples, they were able to better their skills. It looked to me as a direct failure to truly "teach" Math in the 6-7th grade level of their elementary school district.

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