Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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This is a great progression in the series by Zed...if you lurk r/learnprogramming, or any other place full of aspiring coders, a common complaint/desire is that students will have passed all the Khan/Codecademy courses, but have no idea what to do with the pieces of programming fundamentals that they've acquired. This is not just a problem with self-learners...I've seen a few r/learnprogramming posts by CS grads from 4-year-colleges who say they have literally no idea what an API is or why/how to work with one.

And I don't think it's necessarily correlated to the rigor/prestige of the program. I had a discussion with Stanford professor who is building a course that involves hands-on work with real-world data problems...he undertook this initiative after finding that some PhD students, while brilliant in their research and coursework, did not know where to begin with relatively easy data cleaning work. I don't know exactly what the disconnect was, but I'm guessing it wasn't because data cleaning is particularly difficult as a CS problem. But it does require the ability to "see the big picture"...not just how different code modules and components can be designed to talk to each other, but the context and general who-gives-a-shit in regards to a given data/computational problem.

So yeah, thinking about small projects to code for is a great way to make things "click". Can't wait to see what examples Zed comes up with.

Exactly my experience. I started learning web development, specifically Rails, some time ago and did all the usual tutorials, like Michael Hartl's.

However it only started to really click when I was faced with actual real world problems and was able to solve them slowly, but one after another. We needed a simple product catalog (no ecommerce yet) with syncing capabilities from our internal FileMaker system and that small project has turned out to be the most valuable learning experience on my ongoing path of mastering Rails.

I agree 100%. Moving from "Proving theories of computation" and "Syntax to think about computing" to "Projects" is actually a big step. At my undergrad you could graduate with a BA in CS without making the leap. (With a BS you wound up having to get more practical)

I think this is a great idea for him. I'm glad that he's taking CS education seriously. We all benefit.

r/dailyprogrammer is a good resource too, not only for small "projects" but also seeing how others have attempted them. It does have the issue of the top voted answers being in Brainfuck, Haskell, Lisp, Assembly, and a slew of other impractical(? for lack of a better word) languages though.

> Brainfuck, Haskell, Lisp, Assembly, and a slew of other impractical

My argument: Haskell and Lisp are just as practical as Python, Java, C#, or C++ for r/dailyprogrammer problems.

Brainfuck is impractical, I can agree with that.

Haskell is used in the real world. For instance I write Haskell for my day job right now.

Lisp is also used in the real world and was even used to create Lisp Machines[0]. I got contacted by a recruiter for a Clojure job a couple days ago.

I can kind of see why you'd call Assembly impractical for the projects on r/dailyprogrammer, but would like to make sure you aren't claiming Assembly itself is impractical.

My comment was meant to be along the lines of "/r/dailyprogrammer is a great next step up from /r/learnprogramming", so I made my practicality comment in the context of someone learning a first language wanting to learn from other code examples in their language of choice. If only I had an infinite amount of space to add footnotes and disclaimers.

I don't think the languages are universally impractical or unusable for development (BF excluded). However, I _do_ think that they lack the resources[0] important for beginners that are available with much more widely used languages. Not saying they don't have resources geared to beginners, but I've been bitten enough in many fields (programming, cooking, you name it!) by using something not as mainstream that I can comfortably say "Learn the popular way first, then explore." I guess though, if the goal is to go from zero to a job writing Haskell, then the "popular way" would be to learn Haskell!

Assembly.. I love doing trivial routines in assembly because it feels like a puzzle, but I struggle to think of where I would practically use it. Even on uCs such as ATtiny2313, I gain so much from being able to do control flow in C. The most assembly I've written from college is actually in TIS-100[0], hah.

[0]: http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/

[0a] http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html

[0b] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=405

I was in a bit of a hurry, so thanks!

Not sure if you realize this, but this comment about "impractical" languages reduces your chances of future employment in a number of companies to near zero.

I mean of course the companies that use some of the languages you mentioned to build large software systems every day.

That's fine. I have not really ever had companies actively seeking me based on my non-LinkedIn activity, so there's no change in the status quo there. I don't claim to know any of those languages well enough to be paid to use them for "large software systems", but luckily enough there are a significant number of companies that do development in languages I do deem practical :)

I find the downvoting slightly amusing, given the fact that I am one of those employers. I was stating a fact.

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