{"id":185,"date":"2009-09-21T10:56:38","date_gmt":"2009-09-21T17:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/35.225.155.113\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/09\/21\/learning_to_program\/"},"modified":"2019-10-13T13:14:14","modified_gmt":"2019-10-13T20:14:14","slug":"learning-to-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/09\/learning-to-program.html","title":{"rendered":"Learning to Program"},"content":{"rendered":"

In high school<\/a> I took my first formal
\ncourse in programming, an introduction to Computer Science with BASIC
\nand the good-old Apple \/\/e. My friends and I drove our teacher, Mrs.
\nMcBride, a bit batty. She knew we knew our stuff, but so did we. As a
\nresult a few of us would do anything but work. I hardly documented my
\ncode and when I did I’d write all kinds of nonsense to see if she was
\nactually checking. I was sloppy with my variables, created them
\nwhenever and wherever. Same with my logic, the code jumped around
\nfrom one GOTO to the next as it occurred to me. Spaghetti code<\/a> it its truest form, writing on the fly with no consideration of design.<\/p>\n

Yet I aced the course. I had so many
\npoints that I could have skipped the final and still have easily passed.<\/p>\n

How?<\/p>\n

Well an interesting dynamic developed,
\nI and a couple of my classmates comprehended enough that, even with
\nour lack of application our B and C work ended up as A++ because the
\nrest of the class was struggling. Struggling so much so that even on
\na curve set by us, others would have failed. So the next highest
\ngrouping of grades defined the grading curve, resulting in extra
\ncredit points for my friends and I.<\/p>\n

Introduction to Compute Science I in
\ncollege<\/a> was more of the same, minus the sliding scale. This despite
\nthe fact that the computers had changed along with the programming
\nlanguage, C and IBM clones. I aced my tests and programming exercises
\nand wondered how others failed to see that the Professor had
\nbasically written the answer on the blackboard, short a line or two
\nof code, while explaining the concept at hand.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\"Distribution<\/span><\/p>\n

\nApparently, this type of grouping,
\nbetween those who start to develop a clear understand of the concepts and
\nthose who don’t isn’t that uncommon. You either pass, grasping all
\nthat has been covered or you fail to grasp even the most fundamental
\naspect of the theory and get left behind.<\/p>\n

So I’m just lucky, right? I just got
\nit. After all I remember going to a campus preview and being told by
\nthe head of the Computer Science department that. “No, we don’t
\nexpect incoming students to have had classes in programming prior to
\nentering our program.”1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Well Michael K\u00f6lling a Professor at
\nthe University of Kent notes in a recent posting, Quality-oriented
\nteaching of programming<\/a>, that while this type of division has been
\ncommon for decades, it may be more about how the concepts are
\ntaught, one building on the other, than about any natural ability to
\n“just get it.”<\/p>\n

That is, if you don’t understand a
\nfundamental concept, however are you expecting to understand a more
\nadvanced one? Yet that’s exactly how Computer Science has been taught
\nfor years.<\/p>\n

I say he’s right.<\/p>\n

Consider my own subjective experience;
\nI struggled with the transition from BASIC to Pascal in high school.
\nAll those bad programming habits caught up to me. The light bulb
\ndidn’t go off until I revisited structured programming<\/a> with C in
\ncollege. Same happen when the college adopted object-oriented programming<\/a> and C++. I, along with a few others, basically had to
\nretake CS I, with all the same algorithms and data structures but now
\nwith these odd concepts of “objects” with their “methods”. I
\nnever felt comfortable with OO until I came back to it a few years
\ninto my career as a web developer with Perl.<\/p>\n

It’s a shame really. All those people
\nout there now, thinking that they just don’t “get it” when it
\ncomes to computers, that they’re not technologically savvy enough.
\nJust like all those people who throw up their arms in frustration the
\nmoment you mention algebra or statistics. “I just don’t get this
\nstuff.”<\/p>\n

But of course the failing isn’t
\nnecessarily that they lack some left-brain analytical function, but
\nthat they never got the time\/chance\/break to develop that
\nunderstanding in the first place.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

1<\/a> Keep
\nin mind this wasn’t MIT and my senior year in high school was 1992. So while I had a
\ncomputer at home, was enrolled in computer programming classes and
\ngetting ready for the Advanced Placement test in Computer Science,
\nthe personal computer revolution had only just reached it’s zenith before the 1991 rescission. In other words, the
\ndepartment chair wasn’t assuming that any incoming student had been
\ngreatly exposed to a computer – other than video games and word
\nprocessing – let along programming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In high school I took my first formal course in programming, an introduction to Computer Science with BASIC and the good-old Apple \/\/e. My friends and I drove our teacher, Mrs. McBride, a bit batty. She knew we knew our stuff, but so did we. As a result a few of us would do anything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[215,218,216,43,106,217],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}