drumsrgr8forn8

Definitely not the most elegant thing I've written. But I've been feeling like doing the exact opposite of what this post says lately. It gets really frustrating to be asked regularly "It should be easy" or "Why can't you _just_". It isn't JUST. No change is JUST anything. Trying to remind myself with this post.

I'm sure I'm not being clear enough so please let me know where I can make improvements and let me know what questions you have for part 2.

Yeah, it's definitely not for everyone. It's just the kind of thing I would like though.

I would just like to thank dalanmiller for making a pull request to my fork of octopress correcting several grammar and spelling mistakes. That was a really cool thing to do and I appreciate it.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm definitely not the best writer out there but would like to be... I REALLY should have ran this through a spell checker and felt stupid when I finally did. If you have any more detailed critiques and feel strongly enough about them to share please feel free to email me.

Yeah... I may go through at some point and refactor this post some. I personally get a kick out of funny names and goofy stuffy but several people have made the point that it can be distracting to some people. The key things are just passion, clarity, and context. I experienced none of those things back in school... truly, not just from my programming classed but from 90% of all my classes. I can probably name all the good teachers I've had from grade school through university on one hand.

Absolutely. I kinda wish I had written more in this post about context... I had a similar frustration with math even though we did many, many more exercises... Some kind of practical real world context really helps.

If you just naturally love math and think that way you can often see the context yourself anyway (or at least I did) but your average word problem at school isn't much of a real world context. When the hell will I sit around with my friends and say "Hey Jennifer, lets get that volume of beer in that cup. That sounds like a good time".

Lol. After reading my own comment I think I'm terrible at my native language, too. I need to stop writing things before I've had my morning coffee.

Yeah fair enough. I wasn't really critiquing the explanation so much as that was the end of it. They also made us hand write assignments and quizzes thinking it would somehow keep us from cheating. It's been several years now so I wouldn't be able to accurately remember but I _feel_ like most of what we did with recursion from that point on was on paper and we were pretty much left to our own devices to figure out recursion...

That's lovely! Part of me thinks that kind of thing should have been more of the focus of my post.

I think that's a fair point. Guerrilla pretty much said what I would say... most of my production code just uses plain Jane clear names like "user" or a variable named "name_array".

The bigger message is to communicate that programming is fun to people who want to learn. I think you're average working programmer out there probably is... but my "educational" experience was not that way. It wasn't really about using whimsical names either, it was because it was taught so passionless and half-assed. I really am just saying this works for me and I see a lot of kids coming into Ruby and to Rails really getting a kick out of the small stuff... It's passion and it's details that are important... whimsy is optional.

Thanks for the feed back... I really am a terrible spelling. I at least ran through a spell check and corrected those errors real quick. There's two errors where there's no space between a word where markdown is parsing it that way. Might just un-italicize those words later. If you notice any grammar mistakes that are annoying please feel free to email me and I'll fix them.

That's awesome. If I had had a similar experience I probably would have been all in much earlier in my life.

I've worked through some of it! That's exactly the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

My Erlang learning has been a little spotty so far but I'm going to Erlang Camp in Nashville next month to fill in some holes. I've been playing a lot with Elixir and that's been helping too.

This is where I meant to say YES! Absolutely! But I was on my phone and missed.

Thanks for commenting. I would definitely say clarity comes before whimsy. That was part of my frustration back in college was the complete lack of clarity. Recursion was taught in about five minutes like this: "A recursive function is a function that calls itself until it reaches a terminating condition..." and then it was never explained again. No one got the recursion questions right on the end of unit quiz except the kids who had been programming since they were young. It wasn't until about 5 years later that I finally wrapped my head around recursion myself.

I really appreciate your comment. Education is really important to me and Kahn Academy has been a huge inspiration to me.

Far far too many

Yes! Absolutely!

woops! see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424885