Learning to program is getting harder - <AUTHOR> http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2018/02/learning-to-program-is-getting-harder.html <comment><USER3> Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps _immensely_ when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling.

Younger programmers seem to commonly have zero knowledge in this area. If they run into some problem with their environment, they are completely stuck. Oh, they're asked to install a VPN client but it doesn't work and they have to debug it? They're completely blocked. They have no idea how to continue.

For me, I learned these basic computer skills first (because I was _obsessed_ with computers as a child). Then I learned to program.

I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. You have people that want to be programmers but don't include "computing" as one of their hobbies. So of course they don't know anything about how to debug computer problems. This is totally expected.

Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea.

<comment><USER4> I agree completely --- being one of the "older programmers" \--- and think it could be phrased thus: a new generation of "coders" is being forced to learn how to write instructions for the machine, when they are barely computer- literate.

Having taught some introductory CS courses a few years ago, the amount of struggling with basic things like file naming, directory hierarchies, and even simple hardware use was a constant distraction.

On one memorable occasion, I had to help a student by _turning on the monitor_ : he would sit down at a workstation, move the mouse and tap the keyboard, and seeing nothing show up on the monitor after a moment, go to another unoccupied one. I watched, without intervention, him try this with all the unoccupied workstations in the lab until he finally came to me and said, in an exasperated tone, "all the computers left are broken!" I lead him over to one, and upon pressing the power button on the monitor, the expression he made was quite unforgettable...

<comment><USER5> There aren't really any clues as to how a computer works on an iphone. There isn't even a visible filesystem. It's no wonder students today have no idea how a computer works.

<comment><USER6> Wait, the previous generation had no phones at all. Do you mean that today's generation use phones instead of computers? In that case, I understand your point.

<comment><USER7> This reminds me of a story I recently heard where a student at a digital arts college reported they were saving their file inside photoshop instead of a folder.

It sounds bizarre - because they were using an iPad/iPhone instead of a computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I disagree.

Creating a program that meets todays' users expectations is what's harder.

But learning programming by itself, is way easier.

We have Python, Ruby, Javascript... We have the Web as a platform and as documentation. We have communities and cheap, fast computers.

The hello world has never been easier to do.

What's hard is to make a real time offline first SPA with a beautiful responsive design that uses the same API backend as the mobile app while integrating with third party Saas and leveraging social medias.

<comment><USER9> But the learning curve of getting an environment setup to do that is steeper.

<comment><USER10> It's not. Installing a C++ tool chain two decades ago is much harder than any current environment.

<comment><USER11> Really? I remember it being rather easy circa 2003. On Windows, you could download an installer for Dev-C++ or the Borland compiler, install it like any other program, and you were done. On virtually every other platform, you didn't have to do anything at all: the system came with a C++ toolchain ready to go.

I'd say it's still just as easy to get going with those sorts of tools now, and the same goes for many other languages, like Java and C# for example.

That said, I think the question of whether it was easier to start programming then versus now has a more nuanced answer. The kinds of programs people are likely going to want to write—like mobile apps, web apps, and games—are a lot more complex these days than their equivalents were back then. On the other hand, there are boatloads of free tooling and information readily-available to help people through it. On the third hand, there could perhaps be issues of information overload if you go looking without a guide.

So, getting started is one thing, and I can't say for sure whether it's harder now versus then. Of course, that's a slightly different question than whether it was easier to _learn_ programming then versus now. _This_ question is easy for me to answer: of course not, learning it now is just as easy[1] as it's ever been!

[1]: Or hard, if you're of the glass-half-empty persuasion ;)

<comment><USER10> You had to install Visual Studio then the Windows SDK then probably other libraries. Then spend an afternoon to set environment variables and project settings until it can compile anything.

Dev C++ and code blocks had a an easier start, although they were bugged to death and only used for hello world projects.

Borland is paid software. There was a free edition was very challenging to obtain. That certainly contributed to the death of the company.

If we talk about two decades strictly. There was no internet so you couldn't find any tutorial or help page. Books were selling for $50 each and you couldn't Ctrl+F them.

On Linux a newbie can "gcc -o helloworld.c" to compile his first C file. Then there is a massive gap until he will be able to compile multiple files with make, auto tools, manage external libraries and package anything to run on another computer. Now it's 2018 and Linux still doesn't have a C++ debugger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is presenting a wildly rosy view of the past.

In Commodore 64 days you got some book that was all you had. You couldn't email the author of the book or look online.

If you got through the huge filter of the initial steps being much harder than today then you were doing well and would go on.

However, the endless set ups and downloading every library that is used is going to make maintenance of programs in 5, 10 or 20 years a nightmare.

<comment><USER13> Not just some book, usually lots of books, from the fundamentals of BASIC to technical references with complete schematics for the entire machine. I had a Commodore VIC-20 and it certainly came with all these.

And even then, experts and resources were available online, for suitably primitive values of "online". Think CompuServe.

Another thing we had back then but less so today was magazines, full of programming and technical tips and info, usually tailored to a particular computer family. (So, Commodore magazines, Tandy magazines, Apple magazines, etc.) Once business computing took off, the dominant players (PCMag, MacWorld, etc.) became more productivity-oriented -- but I still learned Windows programming from the free utility and programming columns in early 90s PCMag. And then once the Web hit, the dead tree publishers were fighting over scraps.

<comment><USER14> The manual didn't tell you anything. The books didn't tell you anything. They scratched the surface, which if you knew nothing might have seemed profound, even mind-blowing, but if you were trying to do anything non-trivial you were left grasping for answers.

I tried to build games on the C64 using BASIC and, while I had some success, the results were always limited by the fact that it was in BASIC, it was going to be slow, and that planning and editing your code was extremely painful, you didn't even have a proper text editor.

The real way to develop on the C64 was with assembly. Unfortunately, finding information on how to do this was virtually impossible. Almost no books existed, and those that did were rare and expensive. Even when you got the book you were missing huge chunks of knowledge: The CPU itself is just 10% of the problem, the rest is knowing the memory layout, the supporting chips, and so on, stuff that wasn't well known.

The methods employed by actual production games were dark and mysterious, often close to protected secrets. You were welcome to painfully disassemble these games, but you also had no tools, not even a basic assembler, unless you went out and bought one.

Today it's easier than ever to build games for vintage hardware because everything, every little thing, is lovingly documented. This was absolutely not the case in the 1980s.

<comment><USER15> Why didn't you just buy the Commodore Programmers Reference Guide[0]? It had an entire guide to C64 machine language, and _circuit schematics_. The book even tells you to buy the 64MON cartridge if you're serious about programming in assembly. This book wasn't rare. A friend of mine had it, we lived in the middle of nowhere. These programs and cartridges were not rare. I had multiple catalogs for buying these things as kid. The best programming books had code listings on page, and line by line explanations on the facing page.

[0] [https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commodore_64_Programmer%27s_Re...](https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commodore_64_Programmer%27s_Reference_Guide)

<comment><USER16> Funny... I didn't even know that book existed until I was a few years into learning how to program my C64. I honestly thought you were supposed to figure things out by randomly PEEKing and POKEing addresses to see what they did. I had complete tech illiterate parents and no mentors existed to point me in the right direction.

I remember visiting some other kid who had a C64, and his dad had given him the Programmer's Reference Manual. He never opened it and didn't care about programming at all (he just used the thing to play games). I cracked that book open and my mind was blown!

<comment><USER17> I thought the guide that came with the C64 mentioned the Programmer's Reference Manual. I remember asking my dad to get a copy and he told me that I had to finish the first book before we could get it.

> I cracked that book open and my mind was blown!

I really wish I had had the opportunity to read through one when I was younger.

<comment><USER15> It did. The last page of the User's Guide[0] that came packaged with every C64 says:

> Commodore hopes you've enjoyed the COMMODORE 64 USER'S GUIDE. Although this > manual contains some programming information and tips, it is NOT intended to > be a Programmer's Reference Manual. For those of you who are advanced > programmers and computer hobbyists Commodore suggests that you consider > purchasing the COMMODORE 64 PROGRAMMER'S REFERENCE GUIDE available through > your local Commodore dealer.

Honestly, until I checked the PDF just now, I thought the User's Guide came with a card to order it through the mail.

[0] [http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_users_guide/c64-users_gu...](http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_users_guide/c64-users_guide.htm)

<comment><USER14> My "local dealer" was a Radio Shack and they didn't sell anything Commodore related. If you wanted to know about Tandy, though, did they ever have you covered!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember when I was first learning Java, whacking my head repeatedly against all these sorts of problems - WTF is a JRE vs. a JDK, why is it asking to install a browser toolbar, WTF is Eclipse and why doesn't it just let me _run_ the file that I'm working on without going through half an hour of researching "Run configurations" and classpath BS first, etc. It was doable, but as a new person to the whole ecosystem, it was seriously painful to even get to the point where "Hello, world!" would run. Then I tried to get OpenGL working (I wanted to do games), and I probably blew an entire week futzing with configuration just to draw a rectangle on the screen. TBH it was harder than getting the same thing done in C++.

And compiling it all into a Real Executable that would run on Windows like a normal program? Forget about it...not even to get into Web Start, applets, Maven and JavaFX (remember that disaster?), oh my!

Then I discovered Processing, which bundled everything (Java runtimes, libraries, etc.) together in a nice tidy package, and its own IDE where you could just open up the thing, type in some code, and hit the big obvious "Run" button. Want a library? Download it from the nicely curated set that are guaranteed to work! Wanted to create an executable, click "Export", and it just works! All the nastiness of linking native dependencies, bundling the JRE, handling classpaths and linker flags, it was handled once by the devs working on that project, and end users could just focus on code.

Things are getting better with other technologies these days, but it's still rare that I see an environment as zero-config as Processing, apart from web- based Javascript playgrounds. All it takes is a pure focus on usability, which I think is something that as devs we often overlook because once _we 've_ gotten over the installation problems that we're familiar with ("well of _course_ brew is better than MacPorts, and you'll need to install nvm and pick the right version before this library will work, except for this one dependency that's only available through RubyGems, and this other one that") we forget that they can be confusing and really off-putting to newbies.

Python environments are particularly bad, IMO because of screwy webs of dependencies that more often than not fail to install cleanly and the Python 2 vs 3 split.

<comment><USER19> On the other hand, Python's "batteries included" means you can go a long way without installing anything. Sometimes I think people forget to look in the stdlib:

[https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand this viewpoint at all. There's a breathtaking amount of tutorials, Q/A (stackoverflow), forums, chats, that can get someone started with a fraction of the effort it took for me to learn programming 20 years ago. There are one-click installers for programming languages and for IDEs. There are entire free books online to learn specific languages or frameworks.

I think people have gotten lazier and they expect to be taught, rather than seeking out materials. Or perhaps the people wishing to learn, are not as interested in programming as they think they are.

That being said, yes, learning "cloud" is an enormous sink of time that requires some exposure to lots of different silos of information. Doesn't that make sense though? It's a complicated subject.

<comment><USER21> As relatively young person I agree. Many people my age and/or younger expect quick results and don't really have the patience to see something through. But like with any other facet in life, if people take shortcuts they totally deprive themselves of vital experiences that are necessary for them in the long run if they want to experience any decent amount of success. Especially if they are wishing to learn something for their career.

In other words, if your objective is to learn programming, how can you possibly hope to create or do anything more meaningful than trivial examples without challenging yourself to learn the environment nor learning howto import 3rd party software libraries so that you don't have to recreate the wheel?

It's part and parcel of not doing anything trivial. Learning to be resourceful by visiting Q/A websites, forums, chats and asking questions, and trying things and failing and getting up and trying again just makes you better.

You learn more by failure and experimentation than by following an example to a T but never venturing outside the sandbox.

<comment><USER20> I'm not that old, 33, but I think I recognize that I wasted a lot of my youth being paralyzed by the thought of failing, when really it is the most successful people who start out by failing. A lot. It is important to get comfortable with failing, and to separate one's failure in trying something from the thought of personal failure. That is "I failed because I need to learn more," versus "I failed because I'm not good enough."

<comment><USER21> > I'm not that old, 33, but I think I recognize that I wasted a lot of my > youth being paralyzed by the thought of failing, when really it is the most > successful people who start out by failing

Well said. Describes me as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I got my CS degree in 2012. It was kinda scary how many students were on the verge of graduation, and were unable to use a terminal, use SSH, or tell you what git is (not that I know exactly o_o).

Those aren't particularly complex concepts. It is definitely partially the schools fault, but CS is also a field where you have to have some interest in what you do. You can't just go through the motions.

<comment><USER23> I wasn't able to use version control at all when I graduated; I didn't even realize it was an option. I just every now and then would make a tar of my project in case I lost something.

I suppose I had copy/pasted some cvs commands from sourceforge in order to download the source of some open-source projects, but that was the full extent of my interactions with source control.

<comment><USER24> I know how to write some software before I went to school, but learning version control there was an eye-opening experience. It's the kind of thing I think they should teach in school to non-programmers. Anybody who writes anything, collaborative or not, is advantaged in some way by using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The author is making an excuse for not including an intro chapter and tool in his book to get the reader to a place where they can start using the book. My sixth grader checked-out a Python game programming book from the school library. He was able to install all the tools necessary to follow along and learn from the book.

Today you have Google, Youtube and every programming language available from scratch to assembler at your fingertips. There is no way it is "harder".

Yea the C64 dropped you into basic. But this was my first experience on a Commodore 64:

"Play A Game" -Syntax Error

"Play a Game of Chess" -Syntax Error

"Let's play Global Thermonuclear War" -Syntax Error

</comment><comment><USER26> Well programming is one piece of the puzzle. I also miss the days when qbasic was preinstalled and easily accessible.

But what worries me more is the actual deployment of the application you write, which is getting more and more complex quite fast.

It seems, I'm in a rare place, where deployment consists of installing a database and extracting an zip file. There's a script you run and the (intranet) service is ready. Updates work exactly the same.

Sometimes I feel a bit ashamed, when clients watch me extracting a zip file, but then I experience deployments and updates of other so called enterprise systems and am completely baffled by their complexity.

Server provisioning and orchestration. Container managment. In memory caches. Sharded databases with master slave setups. Load balancing with health monitoring and what not... And to manage this mess you need a mix of bash scripts, fiddle with permissions, run terraform which itself runs ansible which deploys some docker containers... And when there's a tiny problem the guys in charge are completely roadblocked for weeks.

I have no idea how some people can live with so many layers of complexity and I fear the day, when I need to dig into this mess, eventually...

</comment><comment><USER27> To add to this, one other way programming is getting harder is that there is no incremental path to becoming a developer. In the past, you could easily become a programmer by accident. You wanted to edit your MySpace page, google around, learn some HTML and do it. You wanted to mod a game, you started messing around with the game, download other mods, and change them.

I think this incrementally is gone in two ways. One is that programming is so abstracted away from how we use computers that it's almost in a different world. But even if you figured out what programming is, when you actually attempt to do it, the sophistication of our tools make it a lot harder to get started. Everything that makes us programmers more productive: compilers, build systems, package managers, etc make programming less accessible. There is a lack of coherence between all these tools, no one person designed them, they're the product of bottom-up innovation (the bazaar) which has the problem of making things messier.

I think open-source/bottom-up innovation is great, but eschewing "the cathedral" for a wholly bazaar-based approach is making it a lot harder to learn to program.

What I'm working on now (I'm the founder of Repl.it) is taking a lot of these awesome tools and putting a nicely designed experience on top of them. We want to bring back the welcoming cursor that invites you to program the computer and bring back incrementality to programming, you start from a repl, and from there you can move on to web-dev or what have you. You'd be surprised how fun it is for kids to build CLI programs before moving on to build other things. We put together a page where kids can post about what they're building with Repl.it and it's really inspiring to see: [https://repl.it/ibuiltthis](https://repl.it/ibuiltthis)

I've written more about what I call a "Holistic development service" here: [http://repl.it/site/blog/holistic](http://repl.it/site/blog/holistic) And also here I describe how we went wrong with "Disintegrated Development Environments — How Did We Get Here?": [https://amasad.me/disintegrated](https://amasad.me/disintegrated)

<comment><USER28> I guess it depends on what you mean by "become a developer".

I think a lot of the increased difficulty is the skill of developers. At one point, knowing how to edit HTML would get you an interview. Now, I feel like I might need a successful Python library so I can get an interview...

Not sure if it's a bad thing or not, since the art is just becoming better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> We like to think programming is hard and that there's a barrier to entry that we somehow surmounted because we're oh so smart.

But does anyone here actually know people who learned to program within the last couple years?

My co-founder's girlfriend taught herself enough Javascript and React to help out on our front-end in a couple months. Had no experience except for dabbling in Wordpress. Now closes issues for us.

My buddy learned enough Python to create a GUI for an old card game. Built it to completion enough to challenge himself against the computer player. Hasn't programmed since.

Neither of them had any experience before. These posts really underrate the resourcefulness and intelligence of beginners. And my suspicion is because we like to think it's hard.

People here act like installing Homebrew to download python3 is somehow hard for a beginner when there are hundreds of tutorials online telling them how to do it. Hundreds of tutorials are exactly what I didn't have when I started programming Basic even though the hello-world was a little simpler.

<comment><USER30> I actually think programming is pretty easy. Programming _well_ or in constrained environments is hard. It's easy to learn and hard to master.

I've been coding for 22 years, and each year I feel like I can look back to the year before and say, "Wow, I sucked at programming then."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> One of the consequences of the transition from command-line interfaces such as DOS and Unix to contemporary GUIs such as macOS and Windows is we have moved from environments that do not make a sharp distinction between programmer and user to environments that make a sharp distinction. One of the nice things about command-line interfaces is being able to make powerful tools that are composed of smaller tools. Unix has a powerful collection of tools, and if those tools aren't powerful enough even with combined by pipes, there's awk and sed, and then there are scripting languages. Contemporary GUI applications, however, work very differently. Instead of being composed from smaller programs, many contemporary GUI applications such as Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, and iTunes are large monoliths that are expensive to write (just consider how large the teams engineering these products are, and consider how much effort it would take to write a clone of these programs from scratch), difficult to combine, and are difficult to script unless they are specially designed to support scripting (e.g., AppleScript, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications, etc.). Web applications are even harder to write than native GUI applications, and they are even more difficult to deal with in regards to interoperability and scriptability.

It didn't have to be this way, and there's room for a future where it doesn't have to be this way. The Smalltalk-76 environment demonstrated that it is possible to construct composable and interoperable GUI applications. The Genera operating system for LISP machines worked similarly. Apple's OpenDoc initiative would have introduced the wider world to the concept of composable GUIs, although it was canned as a consequence of Apple adopting the tried-and- true OpenStep platform as the basis of future Mac development. An operating system environment inspired by the Smalltalk environment and LISP machines that provides both a REPL for tasks that are equivalent the Unix command line and an OpenDoc-like API for designing composable GUI or even web applications would create an environment that is both easy to use and programmable. I've been growing more and more excited about the possibility of such an operating system for workstation users that could one day serve as an alternative to contemporary desktop operating systems and environments such as Windows, macOS, and the Linux desktop.

<comment><USER32> I want a machine like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> For me it looks like inverted survivorship bias. You won't hear from people that succeed so you don't have way to count them. People that nag or email author might be even in some special group of 'someone please make it work for me', I cannot imagine mailing author of a book. I do not believe that such group to be really big, maybe it just visible more than others. Like 'plz give codez' on StackOverflow.

Buying a book or reading blogpost does not entitle you to anything more, like wasting author time. Time is most valuable asset and he already spent it on writing book. If that book is crap you can rate it on Amazon or something but directly contacting author?

</comment><comment><USER34> I work at JetBrains on [https://datalore.io/](https://datalore.io/) It's an interactive computational notebook for data science, which automatically recalculates code as you change it. We believe that such an interface lowers the barrier for entry into data science (and programming).

<comment><USER35> Looks great, though I can't find anything about pricing or pricing plans (looks like it's in open beta?)

While I've dabbled with using jupyter for teaching programming to high school students, on the whole its usually too difficult to get up and running for someone who's not already moderately tech savvy. Interface is everything when starting off; this looks quite promising if the pricing is affordable for schools

<comment><USER34> We don't have billing yet, but we have gift codes. If you want to try larger instances or run out of allotted time, let me know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I agree that it's harder to learn to program now than in 1982 (in terms of "hello world" level simple stuff - but not for advanced stuff), but I believe that it's way easier now than in 1992 or 2002.

AppleScript might be an exception in the 1992 case, but it was a fairly specialized case and only for Macs. Otherwise, today you can google stuff easily (vs needing books and such) and even Windows supports installing Linux tools out of the box.

The danger, though, is that in the future we could have fewer and fewer general-purpose computers -- iOS is not as dev friendly as OS X.

However, even on general-purpose computers, don't seem _that_ interested in making it easier, which is sad from a professional pride point of view if nothing else. I set up Android Studio on Linux recently. It wasn't terrible, but even that wasn't a seamless experience - the emulator stuff had a few problems, including included libs that were incompatible with Intel graphics drivers, that I had to work around.

Any time you join a company and have to browse a long dev environment setup wiki or readme, you've seen us all fail. We're bandaging it as fast as we can with stuff like Docker, but that's just delaying the problem until you have to debug your container in prod. ;)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My first computer was a VIC-20 (I later got a Commodore 64), where you also start with a BASIC prompt. I too have been thinking about to the barriers to starting to code.

Last fall, I helped in my son's grade 8 class to teach them python programming. There we wanted the students to be able to start coding with minimal effort, and minimal magic. They already had MacBook Airs, which had python 2.7 already installed, so there was nothing to install. Then we concentrated on a few core programming constructs (no classes for example), and no libraries. This was an attempt to recreate the environment I had when I learnt to program on the VIC-20.

I think it worked really well. The students were able to write fairly advanced (a few pages full of code) with that set-up. If you want to do more advanced programming, you'll need to install more, but for a start it was really good. I've written more about it here:

[https://henrikwarne.com/2017/12/17/programming-for- grade-8/](https://henrikwarne.com/2017/12/17/programming-for-grade-8/)

</comment><comment><USER37> I'll be honest with you. Programming is actually pretty easy to learn.

As long as you have a vague idea of how logic works and are eager to learn with the right approach, you can pick it up pretty quickly.

A lot of the concepts floated around in programming have crazy sounding names but are actually not that bad.

What's really hard to learn, however, is full on software engineering.

Knowing how something works end to end. Sure, you can learn to program well in JS, but that won't translate right away to knowing how to build an awesome website.

You can be an excellent java programmer, but that won't translate right away into architecting a nice Android app.

For me at least, when I was an up and comer, these were the things that were hard to put together.

Every tutorial site wants to jump into a lot of details right away - I wish they started with a high level overview of where you'd need the language, where it fits in in the larger "app" picture (where app can be a site, an app, etc.) and then dive into the specifics.

<comment><USER38> Hi, I completely agree you. I am currently learning how to code. I am at that point where I know the syntax of of a few language pretty well and can code up small programs.

However, I do have difficulties in architecting and developing a fully functional application.

How did you solve this problem?

<comment><USER37> Not sure you'll see this but honestly man, if you have friends in the field just ask them, plain and simple. Not saying this is you, but often people don't go this route because pride, etc.

If you don't know people in the field, chances are there are software people where you work - some are douchy to people just learning (pfft, you think you can learn this craft in months?) but others are willing and eager to help others. Find them and again, just ask them to point you in the right direction.

Lastly, find a class. Nothing crazy like a 25k bootcamp or anything, but find something like building a site end to end in 2 days or something like that.

A lot of this stuff is tribal knowledge and not captured well in tutorials. There are excellent tutorials for learning the technical things, but not necessarily for putting everything together into a working app.

Hope that helps!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > Computer retailers stopped installing development environments by default

This is true, but somewhat ignores web browsers. The big ones (Chrome, Firefox, IE & Safari) all have complete and high quality dev environments.

The article is Python-centric, and so the best answer for that right now is: install Anaconda!

Otherwise, the general argument being made here is solved by JavaScript at the moment.

If you use JS to write code, there's nothing to install, distribution is built in, it comes with the dev environment. All language and feature comparisons aside, this is the strongest reason to use JS, because it makes sharing programs with other people so insanely easy compared to any other language.

<comment><USER40> BASIC is easy to understand. Javascript is incomprehensible in comparison.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637866)

        var drawing = document.createElement('canvas');
        document.body.appendChild(drawing);
        var ctx = drawing.getContext('2d');
        ctx.beginPath();
        ctx.moveTo(0, 0);
        ctx.lineTo(100, 100);
        ctx.stroke();

VS

        SCREEN 13
        LINE (X1, Y1) - (X2, Y2), COLOUR

I'm not claiming BASIC is a good language, or that it teaches good programming. But it is very easy to use.

<comment><USER39> That's true for drawing one straight line, sure!

The question here wasn't whether the language is easy to use, the issue raised in the article was whether the language & dev environment are pre-installed, how hard they are to install, and then how hard the programs are to share after you're written them.

No version of BASIC is being shipped with any OS today. You still have to download the language and a dev environment on a brand new (Windows) computer. And when you share a BASIC program, you either have to build an executable that will run on someone else's machine, or the recipient has to install BASIC on their own. (The article was about sharing code & learning to code, so a binary isn't ideal.)

JavaScript and the dev environment, on the other hand, comes with every new computer, on every OS, because browsers are pre-installed.

BTW, is this modern basic? That looks like what I remember from DOS 2.0 in 1980. :P

To be fair, you're comparing HTML canvas API to BASIC's native line drawing, this example doesn't actually say much about the JavaScript or BASIC languages. And it doesn't compare BASIC's graphics to canvas's... with canvas you can draw curves and bitmaps and do transforms. I'm not familiar with whether BASIC can do that these days.

In my experience, canvas is quite easy to use, even compared to BASIC. I know you were joking, but incomprehensible is what I'd use for, say, Vulkan or DX12. JS+canvas is _very_ comprehensible and easy, at all times, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Honestly, if I were teaching someone to program now, I'd just tell them to buy a raspberry pi. For $50 for the nice kit, plus a surplus monitor + keyboard + mouse, you get a fully working toy dev environment preinstalled. You also get piles of programming tutorials written for that _exact_ environment.

</comment><comment><USER42> I personally know otherwise competent Java backend devs that have no idea how http works at all. Pipelining, gzip/deflate, Cache-control headers, XSS, uri concepts, bandwidth consumption, proxies, etc...not even the foggiest clue. There's just so much breadth, abstraction, inversion-of-control, and pressure to deliver in corporate environments. There's little incentive to be a big picture person when you're rewarded solely for closing out stories and pushing out change requests. The resulting hit in quality is atrocious.

</comment><comment><USER43> There's another option the author doesn't consider: _Change programming_ , or create fundamentally different programming paradigms that entirely obviate some of the requirements we have now.

One idea that's a fairly natural progression from where we are now is Luna, a WYSIWYG data processing language: [http://www.luna-lang.org](http://www.luna- lang.org)

A loftier re-imagining is Dynamicland, co-founded by Alan Kay and Bret Victor: [https://dynamicland.org](https://dynamicland.org)

</comment><comment><USER44> This is why I recommend people learn how to program using javascript at first. There are no downloads, there is no setup and given some simple instructions you can mess around with fully formed pages just by typing into the console what you want to do. The modern browser has all the tools for a programming course that takes place almost entirely in the console.

I lean more towards the python/C++ side of things but for just diving in and seeing something cool for quick, colorful motivation to learn, javascript fills that need better than anything else.

<comment><USER45> > There are no downloads, there is no setup...

For a REPL/solving an algorithms problem? Sure. And the first time they want to use some code from StackOverflow that uses a _library_ , god forbid, it's off to the races. Require? Script tag? Webpack? Transpile? Minify?

All of those things are important tools, but their use (and presumption of their use, a la "just import 'map' from underscore.js; you know the drill") is so widespread as to present a major stumbling block for first-time programming explorers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm afraid a very important point was missed.

What is it that's being programmed?

Commodore 64 programmers were never interested in "Bayesian Statistics" and "Digital Signal Processing". Their main interest was pretty much related to systems programming in one way or another.

Today's "programmers" expect to do crazy things like carry out statistical analysis on megabytes of data, in a matter of minutes, with all kinds of insightful plots, and animations and what not. (Same goes with DSP).

Today's programmers are NOT asking for what Commodore 64 programmers were asking for. They're asking for way way more.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. But who's is to provide such shiny interfaces to future Bayesian-statisticians and Digital-signal-processors?

\- System programmers do massive research to automate for today's programming demands, workflows, and activities. And a lot of people are working in this space. But it's full of information overload without a clear winner.

\- Or one of their own takes a hit for the team, transitions into system level programming, and uses his past experience to create usable interfaces, processes, workflows, and associated software. It's not an easy task.

I think now we're talking about something I've been struggling with for many years, a computational science workflow software. Again there are hundreds of projects in this space but that makes it even worse. How do you chose between them? Someone says he/she uses Sumatra and it works for him/her. But it may not work for someone else. Someone else says you should follow Cookiesutter Data Science guidelines. But that's also addresses on a small aspect of the overall problem. Etc, etc. The there are the emacs diehards who claim you can do everything in emacs so why leave emacs. Well I can do everything in linux + shell + C so why leave linux + shell + C? (point being emacs only let's you do everything by becoming an OS in itself).

I don't have a solution.

I'm working on this problem in my spare time from a very very different meta level angle. But that is a massive research project and cannot be finished in a matter of a couple years, much less without funding.

</comment><comment><USER47> I find this difficult to understand.

Computers in 1979 would be 500 dollars in equivalent today money for something like a sinclair zx-80.

Now computers are cheaper than lunch.

Computers of long ago couldn't do much... the raspi zero wireless can do a lot.

We're looking for treasure - but there's diamonds on the soles of our feet. We just need some curriculum worked out - like the article indicates computer usage + computer programming.

We assume a lot is just absorbed by kids - but it isn't it must be taught.

<comment><USER48> yeah, nowadays you can get a PC which you can use to develop anything under $300.

Nowadays there are millions of prime quality materials on the web for free - audiobooks, videos, books, whatever suits you.

Nowadays the best IDEs in the industry are free - a few years ago you needed to shell out hundreds of dollars.

The only thing that got worse is the confusing amount of choices that you need to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Isn't what he said the natural consequence of technology being available to a wider and wider segment of the public, reaching ubiquity? This is to be expected when what was originally something only known in a small circle is now having to be used by essentially everybody then. One thing that can definitely help is to incorporate programming as mandatory into national/state school curricula as soon as possible. Programming literacy could become something like writing literacy, though of course we're not quite there, yet.

Everybody having a solid grasp on programming principles would also protect the democratic society in the sense that people would have an idea on how the software they're using daily actually work, what is being done to their data, etc. Leaving such a fundamental fabric of the society in the hands of few is self-evidently dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER50> I love Ruby the language, but I absolutely hate Ruby the platform. I've never run across a more hostile landmine-ridden terrain for new developers. Every time I have to ramp up a new dev, I just resign myself to the fact that it's going to take anywhere from an hour to three or four to get everything installed. God forbid they've actually tried to use Ruby before on their machines.

I've dipped on job prospects which involved code challenges that require me to get their codebase working on my machine. I inevitably wind up having to troubleshoot their broken setup and that takes way more time than doing the actual challenge.

Ruby desperately needs innovation in this space. Bundler and rbenv / chruby / rvm just isn't good enough. Vagrant / Chef just isn't good enough. I understand that dependency management is a hard problem, but other languages aren't half the headache that Ruby is.

<comment><USER51> Before the tire fire that is rvm became "standard", it was normal to just download the version you needed and build it from source. There's nothing forcing us to use crappy, obscure tools like rvm and rbenv. And I agree with you on all points.

<comment><USER50> It's a total shitshow. But since ruby manages everything with environment variables, you need some kind of tooling to manage multiple versions. Horrendous.

Ruby should just standardize on a way to point projects to rubies. Instead of a zillion environment variables, just a shebang. It's how everything else works.

<comment><USER45> > Instead of a zillion environment variables, just a shebang. It's how > everything else works.

I would like to tell you about an environment variable called PATH...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant The fourth option, developing on the cloud and stay there, looks like a good way to lose whatever freedom we had left.

Would the cloud provider let me write pen testing tools? Would it let me put profanities in my comments? Would it give reports of my work sessions to my boss? Would it get a licence to my code?

I'd rather go dinosaur.

</comment><comment><USER52> > Computer retailers stopped installing development environments by default. > As a result, anyone learning to program has to start by installing an SDE -- > and that's a bigger barrier than you might expect. Many users have never > installed anything, don't know how to, or might not be allowed to. > Installing software is easier now than it used to be, but it is still error > prone and can be frustrating. If someone just wants to learn to program, > they shouldn't have to learn system administration first.

I'm not sure I agree with this statement. macOS provides Python, Java, Ruby, etc. out of the box, and a C compiler is one button click away. On Linux a C compiler is provided. For web languages, every browser comes with a full suite of development tools.

<comment><USER53> By leaving MS Windows out of the equation you've just ignored 90% of computer sales worldwide...

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> There is a certain amount of systems administration knowledge you need to have if you are going to be an effective programmer. No, you don't need to be a sysadmin, but but source code doesn't live in a vacuum. I vote for face the pain.

</comment><comment><USER55> "If someone just wants to learn to program, they shouldn't have to learn system administration first."

I may disagree. Even though that's maybe an old school opinion I think every developer should at least understand his own development environment (including the OS), potentially also aspects of the target environment. The reason is because (1) the abstraction between the OS and an(y) (sofisticated) SDE is still leaky (sometimes for a reason) and (2) because a developer that cannot support operations when things turn bad at runtime is just a fair- weather captain.

<comment> Const-me Every good developer should understand these things, but I don't think it's reasonable to demand them from beginners.

I learned to program in Borland Turbo C on DOS, and later in Visual Studio 97. Both were full-featured IDEs, at least by 90's standards. I've only started to learn Windows internals & system administration on my first job in 2000. If knowing system administration would be a prerequisite, I'm not sure I'd become a professional programmer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The point about cloud IDEs being the future is excellent I think. I worked for a bit over a year on a chromebook with no local storage - only a cloud IDE.

It was a lot to get used to at first, but once you have made the context switch, it's great to have everything in one consistent place with tools you can use from literally anywhere.

Similarly, working on a small display pays the same kind of dividend. When you can't put windows of code all over the place you enforce a kind of mental order that's hard to achieve otherwise.

I guess I just want a portable WYSE terminal :)

</comment><comment><USER57> A couple of things bother me about this. First the idea that someone would be a data scientist and not want to first learn how to do the most basic things with their computer. Second the idea that it's hard to do anything on a computer when you can literally type into Google what you want to do, and seconds later can be watching someone else do it on YouTube or reading detailed curated answers on StackOverflow.

</comment><comment><USER58> As someone who makes developer courses / training material I think it's a really bad idea to use online services like PythonAnywhere or Cloud9IDE.

It's really important to learn how to set up your own development environment as a developer and if you're making this content, I believe it's our responsibility as teachers to show people how to do this.

Personally I use Docker in my courses (because it's what I use for my own stuff) and it's been a smashing success. I do get occasional people questioning "why" but after I explain what the process would be like to set up a proper Python dev environment without Docker they immediately see the wins.

Of course I do get Docker related installation questions but it's a small percent compared to questions on the course content. One of my courses is building real world web apps with Flask and it's probably 80% Flask / 20% Docker related questions.

That's much better than punting a local development environment off to a third party service / pre-built VM and then leaving people stuck in the dark for getting anything done on their own.

<comment><USER59> I think I'm in the group that doesn't immediately see the obvious gain of teaching in a Docker container vs. teaching how to install pyenv/virtualenv.

Is it mainly cutting out troubleshooting differences between host OS's while also getting isolated python environments?

Maybe I do see the win there, after all?

<comment><USER58> I think you're starting to see it.

By the way, everything isn't just thrown into a single container. We use Docker to set up the whole app over a series of containers.

So postgres, redis, the flask app and celery all run in their own containers.

Without Docker, you're responsible for getting not only virtualenv set up, but also installing postgres and redis on your box, which is wildly different on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

From a teaching POV, it's easier to level everyone off with Docker, but from a student's POV, it's also easier because now they don't need to worry about any of that. It lets them get to the important material faster. They can just install Docker and run a simple `docker-compose up --build` and they are good to go.

Compare that to listing out a million steps to install python, setup virtualenv, write special clauses for people on Windows or MacOS, etc.. It's a huge burden for everyone, and it's the main reason why I started using Docker for my own projects years ago.

We haven't even talked about installing multiple versions of postgres or redis without Docker too (because apps tend to be developed at different points in time), or deploying an app to production. All of the steps you do to set up a typical real world Flask app on Windows and MacOS are thrown out the window without Docker because your production box is likely running Linux, but with Docker, it's pretty much the same.

<comment><USER59> Ah yes, makes total sense if you're setting up not just a Python environment, but an entire stack. Very cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The problem described is exactly why I wrote a short "How to Code" primer a couple years ago. It teaches some basics of Javascript. Javascript, at least in the browser, can be run with no extra dependencies. Everyone has a web browser these days.

[https://www.joeldare.com/blog/post/how-to- code/](https://www.joeldare.com/blog/post/how-to-code/)

</comment><comment><USER61> The question of "where to begin" is certainly a lot harder now. Learning to program the way my generation did, the programming itself was obviously harder - assembly vs Python for example - but the path and the progression was laid out for you.

For me it was BBC Basic, then 6502, then 68k with DevPac on the ST... myself and a friend wrote our own driver for a modem we found in a skip and that is how we first got online... good times

</comment><comment><USER62> I also think learning to program is getting harder, but at least you can start easy today. When I started to program in the early/mid 90s it was very difficult for me to start as teenager. I didn't know anybody who did and had a (copy) of a compiler for me. At least I found QBasic (was in DOS included). It was very easy to program and debug something. The program could be as just one line of code. Just hit F5 (as far I remember) and the thing did run. But it was just an interpreter and slow. The included help was pretty good. Later I tryed to program Assembler under DOS. But again, no compiler, I had just the DEBUG function from DOS. With that it was possible to write Assembler direct in memory (but not save to a file). Also no marks for jumps .. you had always to calculate the address by yourself.

My QBasic book had (still has) 416 pages. It included EVERYTHING you could do in QBASIC. My Assembler book was a bit more slim (XT-486, before MMX). A "complete" book today would need over 10000 pages. There are sooo many things you can do. There are almost a infinite number of librarys on github.

</comment><comment><USER63> I get along pretty good on blind trust, issuing commands provided in tutorials or setup guides sometimes having little understanding of what the heck it is that I'm doing. There is always an end point that I'm highly interested in and I spend my time learning the ins and outs of. I spend my time learning what I need to learn when I'm stuck. Sure this attitude can be disasterous. I keep current and offline backups at all times and not nuking the production code is a standing order. I know enough to install Gogs, but I am by no means an expert on all things git quite yet. If it weren't for stack overflow and search engines I'd still be writing inconsequencial stuff in Director Lingo. No one can afford the time to really understand the stack, its tens or hundreds of millions of interconnected lines of thought. When I take time to learn something I intend to do something useful with it. At this time my mind is like a buffer. For every new thing I learn, stuff from 10 years ago is fading fast. There is a lot to learn sure. There is even more that is forgetable.

</comment><comment><USER64> I enjoyed the article, the author has some good points. I started on the Commodore 128 and I'd have to disagree with the author's conclusion. I think the filter is far less for self-motivated, truly interested users today than it was in the Commodore's heyday.

None of the issues presented are really issues, it's just that there's a larger swath of people who have accepted computers as mainstream devices and can now afford one. Or are simply too young and missed the heyday of the truly "personal" computer.

If I were to write a response, it would be titled The Great Filter. I was a computer nerd most of my life, by the advent of the smartphone and the majority of people realized how much the career paid, that whole stigma blew out the window. Unfortunately, the Great Filter is gone, people who would've been filtered out in the 80s are only visible by observing the students who aren't even computer literate enough to have bothered to investigating figuring out how a filesystem works before trying to program.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is a REAL problem. The information overload for becoming a coder is going way up with all these "great" new tools we're getting.

Try messing with the build of a React.js app, and I'll come see how you're doing next week.

Things should be getting easier, and the information overload less. For all scenarios, not just the easy ones. I think more advanced developer tools will be the main driver of this.

</comment><comment><USER66> Its not getting harder, the old systems just forced the users to learn- today, its just magic who works or wont.

Windows, MacOS, Chromebooks - none of them have a compiler and a ide by default. Even the "bash-scripting" is not introduced to new users.

So if you do not choose this occupation, you will never grow into it now a days.

</comment><comment><USER67> I would pay $99 for an Apple TV app that recreates the experience of programming a computer connected to a TV, in BASIC. Something like the Amstrad CPC series computers with lots of built-in commands for drawing graphics, making sounds, etc. I'm trying to get my 8-year-old interested in programming, but there's just too much shit on the computer that gets in the way and too many unrelated parts (text editor, terminal, compiler/interpreter, etc.) for him to think about. I can't use parental controls to stop him from switching to YouTube the moment I walk away, because just about every piece of software has a long list of websites it needs to connect to.

He's used to playing games on the iPad and none of those would be simple enough to inspire him to think that maybe he could make games too.

</comment><comment><USER68> The issue is with annoying, irrelevant and complete-but-not-quite-you-must- tinker-actually-quite-a-lot-first frameworks and build systems.

Not to mention inadequate documentation.

You can learn to program easily still, say with Python or C but learning to use the all the time progressing tools is a completely different thing.

</comment><comment><USER69> While it could be easier, there are few languages I've ever felt I had to go through extraordinary lengths to get running.

Having the patience to set them up is probably a good indicator for having the patience to learn them. (Or rather, the reverse is probably more true)

</comment><comment><USER70> I seem to spend a lot of my time attacking this problem from one direction or another.

I'm currently writing a browser based editor/assembler/emulator for 8-bit AVR. I've made code-running MediaWiki plugins. I even got to the point where I made an entire client-side browser desktop environment.

At the same time as making tools to ease the entry cost, I'm also wary of making tools to conceal the complexity. Helper tools are beneficial, but once complexity is hidden it can grow unchecked. Being able to get a project set-up with ./configure or npm is great, but you have black-box that over time becomes more and more onerous to open up and have a peek.

</comment><comment><USER71> I think it's just a matter that most people use Windows, and programming software is optimized for linux. I once wrote up all the steps required to get youtube-dl working on windows. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453506) Which is quite similar to what you need to do to install a programming language. Nontechnical people will get stuck on things like changing path variables, because they have no idea what that is. Let alone compiling something which is frequently required.

<comment><USER72> Programming certain software is optimized for Linux, but with VS Code and VS Community Edition, and the robust project templates that come out of the box, users can easily get basic C# programs working for free in console apps or even windows store apps with powerful debugging and intellisense tools. When someone is learning to code, C# can get them there quickly and easily once they discover the correct docs.

If you feel programming is optimized for Linux, that's because it's your preference. And a valid one at that! Its just going to tint your view a bit.

<comment><USER71> C# was made by microsoft for windows specifically. The majority of programming languages were not. When I started programming I got very frustrated getting stuff to work right. I remember it used to be near impossible to get pip on windows and eventually found some weird unofficial installer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> This is what glitch is looking to solve: [https://glitch.com/](https://glitch.com/)

To add my take here, this was a problem in 2003 too when I wanted to learn, but C++ was such a hard starting point.

The big takeaway is modern commercial programming is so far from "learning to program". That's a hard gap to bridge when a newbie is learning "making a terminal based calculator and wondering how do I build an 'app' or 'web app'?". One Month a YC company tried to solve this but the market is hard to reach because education is hard.

</comment><comment><USER74> > Some of them send me email. They often express frustration, because they are > trying to learn Python, or Bayesian Statistics, or Digital Signal > Processing. They are not interested in installing software, cloning > repositories, or setting the Python search path!

None of that is new. Setting up an environment that is conducive to coding takes effort if you don't have someone to set it up for you, which describes most new coders. I had a hell of a time learning to code on cheap hardware running Windows 15 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER75> This article lacks any depth! It is easier than ever to program and get started. 5 minute tutorials are available on almost anything and sometimes delivered by 8-9 year old kids.

Even low-level stuff are easier to pick up thanks to the explosion of readily available information and IDEs. No one is using Arduino? Perhaps it is true that newer generation is just less keen to put an effort to study anything outside of the norm of but learning old and new technologies has never been easier.

</comment><comment><USER76> My mother-in-law, who learned to program in the '60s by carrying her boxes of punch cards across campus while getting tear gassed by Berkeley PD, would probably beg to differ.

</comment><comment><USER77> "For beginners, and especially for people working on their own, I recommend delaying the pain."

No, no, no, no, no! This is exactly what caused the problem in the first place.

That you need an IDE is one of the biggest lies in programming. From the terminal on most Linux systems, you can download and install everything in a single line. Then compiling is another line.

</comment><comment><USER78> I had this same problem as the OP describes and my solution after a lot of frustration was taking some tutorials on Linux from Youtube. That actually might not be a bad place to start because bash is a programming language (right?). Teaching some simple bash scripts plus navigating the file system wouldn't be the worst intro to programming and it can now be done in Windows.

<comment><USER79> Yes, bash technically _is_ a programming language - but it's a pretty horrible one in terms of usability, and _not_ the first that I would teach a newbie. Plus, you really don't need it unless your deep into sysadmin stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> As many others, I also disagree. Back in the day, laptops are more expensive and less capable. Now you can program everywhere with laptop and wifi. More importantly, sites like SO makes learning to program so much easier than before. Back then, if you don't know somebody you might be stuck with some silly issues for a long time. Not to mention Windows had frequent blue screen of death.

</comment><comment><USER81> Recently, I've experienced working on a remote server. It was a real pain. You need a crazy fast connection to be productive. Otherwise, you're stuck waiting for changes to save, for pages to load, etc. Of course, you can only hope the network doesn't break down or the cloud IDE company makes a buggy deploy.

As a remote developer, I like working in different places. These places don't always have nice internet. Working with a local environment and 4g connection is fine, because 4g is more than enough to look up docs. But working with a distant environment and 4g connection is very slow and unreliable.

Nowadays, a lot of people praise the "cloud" or everything. Use APIs for everything, Use public CDNs to load up bootstrap and jquery. Use an online IDE. Make a hosted Git service an essential part of your workflow. The thing is, not only do these services occassionally break, but some might get compromised ([https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/browsealoud-coinhive- moner...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/browsealoud-coinhive-monero- mining-hack/)) and some even ask you to install closed source binaries to your system without any idea of what's in it (keylogger, ransomware, anything is possible).

Given all that, when I read that using a local environment is "anachronistic", I can't help but cringe.

<comment><USER82> This really just sounds like issues with whatever web IDE you are using. Remote development does not need to be a huge pain like that.

<comment><USER81> I wasn't using a web IDE, but the dev server was remote. While I suppose remote environments do not have to be a huge pain, I'd be interested to know how to mitigate all of the issues I mentioned in my previous comment. The only solution I've been able to setup is a local environment with minimal set of dependencies calling the network.

<comment><USER82> For testing there are quite a few good remote solutions. Here are a couple I'm familiar with.

[https://developer.github.com/v3/guides/building-a-ci- server/](https://developer.github.com/v3/guides/building-a-ci-server/) [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/README.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/README.html)

My simplified workflow is: do work locally using whatever IDE I desire -> create a pull request -> server runs the tests and puts the results in the pull request. Much faster than running the same tests on my local machine as well.

With the tests being done remote you will also likely not need to commit such large amounts of data that it becomes a problem.

> Working with a local environment and 4g connection is fine, because 4g is > more than enough to look up docs. But working with a distant environment and > 4g connection is very slow and unreliable.

Normally even if you are working remote it's expected that you have a stable, decent, connection. But even without one there are plenty of great options.

For documentation I actually keep that local using [https://devdocs.io/](https://devdocs.io/).

Without internet you don't have sites like stackoverflow and that's a downside that really can't be fixed without some serious work.

<comment><USER81> > Much faster than running the same tests on my local machine as well.

That sounds odd. Usually, while developing, running the whole test suite is unnecessary. So running tests is very fast, as long as you only run the tests that may fail after recent changes. At least that's my experience.

> not need to commit such large amounts of data that it becomes a problem

Not sure what you mean here. Mind clarifying ?

> if you are working remote it's expected that you have a stable, decent, > connection

Definitely ! And 90% of the time I do have a stable connection. But that 10% where I don't (because the wifi breaks down, or I'm on a train to a nearby town), having a remote environment would not work. That's my use case for having a local environment.

> For documentation I actually keep that local using > [https://devdocs.io/](https://devdocs.io/).

Wow, that's cool ! I wasn't aware it worked offline ! Will definitely have a look at this. Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Personally, I feel it's vastly easier these days. The sheer volume of learning material at your fingertips is staggering. I mean, you can just turn on youtube tutorials and soak it in with barely any effort. Most of the time, you can copy/paste whatever error you're getting into a search engine and get instant answers. It's a walk in the park!

</comment><comment><USER84> There was a great blog article on all the non-programming "stuff" you have to do get productive in programming.

Everyone resents doing it but it is very hard to avoid. And it's unclear whether it's inessential to programming.

Does anyone remember this blog article?

The author's name might have been Paul, and he might have been a Coursera teacher.

</comment><comment><USER85> I'm amazed to see that the reaction of many people including the op author, don't think that this is simply the symptom of a field (ide) that haven't evolved in thirty years.

Whenever i open a terminal to type some esoteric command line i don't feel like a tech genius. I feel like someone living in the stone age.

</comment><comment><USER86> When I tried to learn Java years ago, I got stuck with setting path on my Windows computer. Afraid to break it somehow, I gave up on learning Java.

I picked up Shell scripting and html/css years later but I think the logistics of anything is the really hard part. Not the actual activity.

</comment><comment><USER87> It's getting harder because it's become fashionable to shun IDEs that make most of these issues obsolete, and have done so since at least the 90's. It's ridiculous to expect newcomers to a language and/or programming in general to slog through a 20 or 30-step environment setup process. This idea that using an IDE will discourage someone from finding out the more detailed workings of the language, compiler, etc. is nonsense. If anything, immediate progress and reward will _encourage_ new developers to keep going and exploring further, whereas an overly-complicated, tangled mess of setup instructions will just make many people throw their hands up and quit.

Case in point: my first experience with the Delphi IDE in 1996 had me immediately writing a basic text editor _without knowing anything about Delphi /Object Pascal at all_ prior to sitting down with it. Drag, drop, consult the context-sensitive help, write some code, and compile/run, all in the same IDE. It also helped that Delphi shipped with the entire source code to it's RTL and the VCL (Visual Component Library), but that's more important as you get deeper into the language/product.

<comment><USER88> Surprisingly I think I'm the first to disagree.

I find a modern IDE comes with so much implied mental baggage that new users can get completely overwhelmed. Sure, languages which require complex build environments almost demand one, but in simpler environments it can be a lot easier to reduce the cognitive load in a simplified environment.

One can do a lot of programming and learning with just a simple editor (Nano?) and a Python-like environment (repl, interpreter). With quality online notebook-style environments, we can now accomplish an outrageous amount with very little time or cognitive overhead devoted to build tooling.

As professionals, we ought to be familiar with the underpinnings of our tools though. It can be really painful trying to work with a colleague who's afraid of getting low level to really understand their build issues. I've worked with people who actually become visually agitated when I open up a command line.

What's worse (I see less of this these days) are those who are so coupled to their IDEs that they don't use proper build tools - limiting reproducability, CI integration, etc. This was a real problem back in the earlier Java days before Ant/Maven/etc came around.

No need to shun an IDE - I certainly don't, but one needs to understand how it works otherwise you risk having incorrect (overly simplified) mental models about how your programs are built and run.

<comment><USER89> For me it's the opposite. A modern IDE is significantly easier to understand, with far less mental baggage than some hacked together combination of several CLI based tools. The mental drain of clicking some nice green play arrow on screen when you want to execute code is non-existent. The baggage of remembering which tool does what, what weird flag you have to keep adding to one of the commands you need, what keyboard shortcut you needed again to exit your CLI based text editor, all of that takes far more baggage for me. Especially when you have 10 different setups like it, and may not return to some of them for months.

And even if you do somehow remember how all of your CLI tools fit together, you're still missing out on an incredible amount of power and clarity that IDEs provide. A CLI just doesn't have the ability to show information nearly as well as a GUI, it doesn't even come close in terms of the amount of bits worth of information you can show simultaneously, nor in its ability to use positioning and formatting to clarify what's important and related. Add that GUIs provide constant in your face hints that tell you what your options are, and it's no wonder almost everyone finds them significantly more pleasant to use. You don't have to remember anything, it shows you.

Yes, people end up developing bad habits and will run into some problems later. But these issues aren't as significant as people giving up early because of learning curves that are too steep on software which is only vaguely connected to what they actually want to do. "I want to build an app" is what drives people, not "I want to learn all the flags for javac".

<comment><USER90> CLI tools are all about codeveloping the build environment with the project. Instead of you trying to remember the weird flags, write a one-line shell script and save it with the project.

For example, my current side project is built on C+SQLite. The larger chunks of SQL are plain text files so that I don't have to worry about C string escaping. Instead of trying to read them at runtime, I have the build process wrap them in a .o file that gets linked into the executable.

This is relatively simple because it's just a slight variant on what's already happening (.sql files are "compiled" with objcopy instead of gcc), but I've utterly failed whenever I've tried to do something similar in an IDE-based project.

On the other hand, the standard build process is generic enough these days that most projects don't need to do this sort of customization. For those projects, being locked into the IDE's process isn't really a drawback and you may as well take advantage of the benefits it provides.

<comment><USER87> Just to give you an idea of how you would do that in Delphi (even in 1996):

1) Drop an instance of your database-specific query class (or a generic database API query class, such as ODBC, ADO, etc.) on a form or data module.

2) Click on the property editor button next to the SQL property for the class instance in the object inspector.

3) Input your SQL in the provided window (or load/save to/from a file, whatever the property editor allows for).

4) Compile your application.

That's it. The SQL is now automatically included as a resource in your executable and is available to you at runtime as if it were assigned at application startup. And this isn't just limited to SQL - you can do this with any text or binary file. It's all only limited by the imagination of the developer of the component(s) that you're using in the IDE.

Visual Studio has always been a bit more obtuse in how it handles datasets/databases, so it's probably more of an example of how _not_ to do something like this in an IDE.

The point is that a beginner can do the above, whereas I'm not sure that a beginner would even know where to begin when it comes to implementing what you've done (which is very well done, putting all of this aside).

<comment><USER90> I'm glad that at least one IDE gets this particular case right, but I think I missed my broader point.

As a programmer, my job is to produce a set of instructions that a computer can understand. The Unix shell is quirkier than most, but it is a real programming language that I can bring all of my profession's skills to bear on. IDEs, on the other hand, are opaque boxes that work great until you need something they didn't anticipate.

I'll readily admit that my needs are no longer those of a beginner, but my learning path was a pretty steady climb of copy/pasting boilerplate, to making a few small changes, to just starting with an empty file and writing everything from scratch.

I worry[1] that, by hiding complexity from beginners, we may be hindering eventual mastery in the name of making it easy to start learning. Are modern intermediate-level developers asking questions like:

\- I've been told to always do X; what happens if I don't? \- This thing I usually ignore seems vaguely related to my current problem; what does it actually do?

[1] Without any real foundation or evidence

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Not only that, but the perception is going in the opposite direction - <USER2> learning to (or actually practice) programming gets harder - non-programmers seem to think that the proliferation of graphical tools ought to have made programming easier.

</comment><comment><USER92> > Computer retailers stopped installing development environments by default. > As a result, anyone learning to program has to start by installing an SDE

What?

Notepad and a browser is all you need to get started learning the most popular programming language in the world.

</comment><comment><USER93> You don't need a computer to program. Paper and pencil will get you pretty far. Anyone take CS106X at stanford? Most everything was written by hand, only the labs or homework were actually done on a computer.

</comment><comment><USER94> For Python, just try Anaconda/miniconda [https://conda.io/docs/user- guide/index.html](https://conda.io/docs/user-guide/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER95> I started with autohotkey. Still think it's the best gateway from user to programmer. keyboard and mouse macros. It's the first thing you learn on emacs and vim also.

<comment><USER96> I'd say Excel, but potato, potato.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Things are so much easier to program these days. Compare c or asm or cobol to php,ruby, python or modern javascript things are much easier at a higher level of abstraction.

<comment><USER98> > php,ruby, python or modern javascript

But do you really understand those? Do you have a complete mental model of how they work down to the fundamentals?

For C and even C++, I can confidently say YES.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Please don't hijack the horizontal swipe. It is for going back/forward in navigation histoey, not switching between articles on your website.

</comment><comment><USER100> I've been programming for about forty years -- starting as a teenager on a KIM-1 with 1K of RAM. I was playing with digital electronics for years before that which is also a good foundation for understanding the basic logic of some programming operations like AND, OR, and NOT. What I feel is also often missing in the programming community today -- as well as computing education -- is people who have the experience of computers from the wires up.

Nand2Tetris is a course that provides some help in that direction -- but it is still not the same as having been there: [http://nand2tetris.org/](http://nand2tetris.org/)

Back then, programming was one of the most interesting things you could do with a computer. One of the biggest challenge for programmers starting out now is that, frankly, much of what you can do with computers is so darn interesting (e.g. Kerbal Space Program, Minecraft, or just browsing the Web). So, those distractions are often more interesting-seeming than the computer basics of logic circuits, machine language, and fumbling around in confusion (maybe for years in some areas) until things click.

I see that challenge with my own kid learning programming.

Still, there is Redstone in Minecraft -- and even a Forth computer mod for Minecraft. There are lots of programming game-like things like the Smalltalk- derived Scratch now. And great software libraries. And there are places like GitHub and GitLab for sharing code. And even board games like RoboRally.

And Arduinos and Raspberry Pis are very cheap. And you can so so much even on just a cheap Chromebook. I'm writing this on a cheap Acer Chrombook 15 running GalliumOS Linux when I now do most of my personal coding and writing -- both to save money and also to keep thinking about what is possible with the current low-end of personal computing.

JavaScript is still no Smalltalk -- which was a much easier language to learn and use when it is installed and supported, especially since it was designed for kids and went through many years of refinements to make it easier to learn, use, and debug. But JavaScript these days (especially ES6/ES7) is not that bad -- and it is almost everywhere and almost anybody can start programming in it in their web browser. Here is a browser-based playground I wrote recently for JavaScript using Mithril and Tachyons: [http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7/master/src/ui/twirlip7...](http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7/master/src/ui/twirlip7.html)

So programming has never been cheaper or more accessible. And the original article goes into that some, like with the suggestion of starting with a Cloud-based IDE (e.g. [https://c9.io](https://c9.io) ) or simulators (e.g. [http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/](http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/) ).

</comment><comment><USER101> Seems to me the author wants nix, the functional build system, with an easy to use ' browser' of nix configurations.

</comment><comment><USER102> There's a big green download button on github repository pages with an option to download the code as a zip file.

</comment><comment><USER103> specializing is getting harder. DevOps, BigData, AI/ML, Blockchain, Full stack / MEAM, Front-end, Mobile Android Studio, XCode

</comment><comment><USER104> idk assembly looked pretty damn hard to me so I stuck to modern languages.

</comment><comment><USER105> I has never been easy...

</comment><comment><USER106> Programming is not getting harder, these are just the reactions of people who probably shouldn't be in this discipline in the first place.

A great deal of any programming, technical, what have you job is just getting stuff to work. A lot of it has nothing to do with the actual core task at hand or your specialization but still needs to happen one way or another. This means using critical thinking skills, deductive reasoning, the scientific method. It means scouring Google, _trying things_ until you have a clear mental model of whatever insane legacy you're working in.

Back in the day, I'd spend my time at home trying random things, looking at files in a hex editor, disassembling software to figure out how it worked because there was simply no other way. There was no Internet, and the only documentation I had was at my library, which was limited to whatever they had and usually was out of date or incorrect. Sometimes they wouldn't even let me bring stuff home, because I was a kid and why on earth is this weird kid wanting some giant technical reference manual? There were no laptops (that I could afford) so I had to read it there, and then go back home and try more things with my hopefully newfound knowledge.

Today, we have Google, we have groups, the Internet, mobile devices, tons of high quality blogs, books, free online courses, and the industry itself is infinitely larger with resources that still boggle my mind to this day. As long as I have the time, I'm usually able to tackle most any problem. I couldn't really say that as a kid growing up in the early 90's, trying to learn programming. Those were the literal stone ages. No internship programs, most people thought of tech jobs as vocational IT help desk related (at least in my hometown). There were times when I was legitimately stuck with no resources or recourse.

So please, excuse me if I don't find sympathy of these people who cannot be bothered to setup their python envrionment with the aid of stackoverflow.

</comment><comment><USER107> I don't know...if you can't figure out how to install python on a local machine...maybe you don't have any business being a coder to begin with. I mean, come on...

edit: the downvotes from the delicate snowflakes crack me up...

<comment><USER108> Agreed sort of. Especially when the solution is often easily searchable.

I've hired interns and junior folks who have trouble with the command line (special circumstances for FT hire). I offer help, but also tell them that it's their responsibility to understand any extant skill gap and learn. I've worked with at least one older boot camper who threw fits when they had to learn something new on their own to debug a problem. I've worked with much older career programmers who've done the same.

I don't think it's a matter of being a coder or not, rather some people aren't problem solvers, and some people are lazy, and some people dumb, and some people want to be somewhere else. If I had my pick, I'd never work with these people. However, sometimes the people doing the hiring shouldn't be managers, you could say, and sometimes the people making the decisions have incentives to hire bad people. Then you end with experienced newbies, and have to fill a position eventually.

A better articulated post would posit the problem is not inherit to people not knowing things, but people not having to.</comment></comment>


Scientists supersize quantum mechanics: Largest ever object put in quantum state - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html <comment><USER2> Exactly how do they measure whether they've successfully put the "paddle" in superposition?

</comment><comment><USER3> Any ideas on possible uses for this technology though?

<comment><USER4> Not a physicist, but it might be a good leap toward the unified quantum gravity theory. They can use it to investiage quantum gravitational relations, since you have a relatively large object which adhers the laws of both quantum mechanichs and gravity.</comment></comment>


Change the base branch of a Pull Request - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/2224-change-the-base-branch-of-a-pull-request <comment><USER2> Super exciting, as this mistake is SO OFTEN made, especially in open source projects (and definitely in a few internal projects I've been on).

<comment><USER3> We're excited about it too! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Been missing out on this feature for a long while, especially on flows where you have had bug fixes pending for `x.x` that need to land somewhere else than on master first after you have submitted the PR (for example on a release branch on gitflow-ish branching models). And of course when you pick the wrong base by mistake too. Really glad it's there now!

</comment><comment><USER5> It is really a needed feature, glad we have it now.</comment>


A source emailed me his life's work. Then, he ended his life - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/first_person/usa-today-reporter-source.php <comment><USER2> _A source emailed me his life's work. Then, he ended his life_

 _A pardon expert emailed me his life 's work. Then he killed his two sons and himself._

I'm not from USA. I had no idea about this story. When I started reading the article, I started with a feeling of sadness. It always makes me sad to know that someone was facing a problem so great that only saw end their own life as the only solution

If I had started reading the second title, from USA Today, I would have started with the idea that it was the last moments of a monster. And a feeling of anger instead of sadness. It's unbelievable how titles, and photos, can mess with the way you'll face a story you're just beginning to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whoa. So I knew the name Peter Ruckman sounded familiar... this guy was the son of Peter Sturges Ruckman who founded the Pensacola Bible Baptist Institute and held some very hard line (and controversial) cult-like views about the Bible.

Specifically he held that the King James Version was very special and let's just say that he had many followers and that they are especially tough cats to deal with.

That might provide some additional context...

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a _really_ hard time understanding suicidal people who kill their kids -- what are they thinking? In the article the author mentions that Ruckman posted a loving video of one of his sons playing guitar about a year before the murders. wtf indeed.

<comment><USER5>
      I have a really hard time understanding suicidal people

Believe me, you don't want to understand. The only way you can, is if you've been there.

Imagine for a moment that you are in a hostage situation. Someone wants to kill you. They have the gun to your head, and you have no control over it. Maybe it's today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe you'll get out okay? Nobody knows. Inside you're scared as hell. You don't like this one single bit. But you're bound, and you can only struggle so much. They have their foot on your back, standing over you. You're powerless. They're screaming at other people. Yelling at you. Acting irrationally. It only takes the smallest thing to set them off, and there's only so much you can do to stop them pulling the trigger. Sometimes they'll go away for long enough for you to get a rest. Maybe get some sleep. But don't kick your toe or drop something. You'll wake them up and you'll be right in the thick of it again.

But the person holding you hostage, is yourself. It's a part of your mind. And it will sap every bit of your energy to try to fight it. The healthy part of you doesn't want any of it. The healthy you doesn't want to hurt anybody. But sometimes you just can't fight it any longer. It's daily, monthly, yearly, conscious waking nightmare.

<comment><USER6> Reminds me of how David Foster Wallace described it:

"The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure how I feel about this piece. The last paragraph is a quote from [edit: a friend of] the professor's ex-wife asking us not to glorify him, and instead to honor the children he's murdered. And yet the first half of the piece is all about the value of the professor's work; the children's names aren't even mentioned until the very end. I understand that the author only knew the professor in the context of his work, but to me the tone of this piece seems to go exactly against the wife's wishes. Others may disagree of course.

<comment><USER8> > A close friend of Ruckman's ex-wife — the boys' mother — reached out to me > with a plea.

Awkwardly worded, but it wasn't the ex-wife that was quoted, but her friend.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the clarification, that makes this a bit less distasteful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And allegedly the lives of his sons too. That's fucked up.

<comment><USER10> Oy. Odd that's missing from the headline since it changes the context from "passionate" to "psychopath".

The story seems balanced, but the headline is too generous.

<comment><USER11> in a few decades we're going to look back on terms like "psychopath" with the same disgust we look back on victorian labels for notions of inherent racial criminality

<comment><USER10> In a wider view, I agree. But I'm not feeling terrible about using the term for someone that offs their own children. In what context is that not some serious and notable mental disorder? Is "sociopath" somehow kinder?

<comment><USER12> Psychopathy is a specific kind of mental illness and I don't think it's self- evident that anyone who would kill their children is a psychopath rather than afflicted with some other form of mental illness.

<comment><USER10> I'm open to that. Just not any rationale that it was justified. Or that it excuses the headline wording.

<comment><USER12> Who's saying it was "justified"?

<comment><USER10> Whoever decided the headline should say "ended his life" with no mention he murdered his children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >And if nothing else, it should help to debunk the conspiracy theories that would inevitably pop up, he said.

I think this is the exact opposite of how conspiracy theories work.

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems so odd. There isn't any information suggesting a history of mental health issues and the only personal drama seems to be a not dramatic sounding divorce.

<comment><USER15> For a certain kind of person, it's not the drama, but the loss of control or possession, or sense of failure. In the context of divorce, and a particularly sick personality, killing children is a way to maximally harm the mother.

People can be very odd.</comment></comment>


Asterix: Latin Jokes Explained - <AUTHOR> http://www.andrewgirardin.com/asterix-latin-jokes-explained.html

<comment><USER2> Translation is probably one of the harder jobs out there. That and some humor doesn't really cross cultures, even without language barriers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm impressed: it reveals how talented the French-English translator of Astérix is.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More geekery. I tripped across it recently while trying to update a site I own.</comment>


Mozilla suspends Firefox Send - <AUTHOR> https://zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send-service-while-it-addresses-malware-abuse/ <comment><USER2> support.mozilla.org says that[1]

>In light of recent reports of Firefox Send being used to distribute malware we have decided to temporarily take the service offline to implement new features, including:

> An improved abuse reporting capability

> A requirement that users have a Firefox Account to share content

> We are also evaluating other features and capabilities to improve Firefox > Send.

Personally I think this makes sense. The previous setup was too good to be true, and definitely was bound to attract malware and other illegal material.

[1]: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened- firefox-s...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-send)

</comment><comment><USER3> Worth noting this is not an effect of the recent layoffs, being from July 7.

</comment><comment><USER4> "while it addresses malware abuse"

Please, just add this missing context to make it less clickbaity. It has nothing to do with the recent Mozilla events.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This reminds me of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24119024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24119024)</comment>