

What People Really Mean When They Say “I Want to Learn to Code” - douglogue
https://onemonth.com/what-people-really-mean-when-they-say-learn-to-code

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dcole2929
I agree with the author here in principle. Being able to parse out what
someone actually wants from what they ask for is key in pretty much any
business type interaction. And as the author argues what is often the case is
that people want to learn how to build something not Computer Science.

I have a sister in eleventh grade (16-17) who is interested in programming.
But if I tried to teach her programming by going straight to data types and
algorithms her eyes would glaze over. That's not say she is dumb or
traditional CS education is hard but it's certainly not the most interesting
of topics.

However I think the argument against starting by building things the author
barely even glosses over. The ecosystem and tooling to build things has become
so complicated that it makes it hard to start. Someone just learning
programming is probably going to be bored to death by ints and bits, but they
are likewise going to be equally discouraged by the amount of work outside of
coding it takes to get any non-trivial web app up.

And honestly the same goes for mobile development too. It's slightly less
ridiculous but then you run into the issue of things that can't be explained
simply and get relegated to "magic" you don't need to worry about... until you
do.

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jbergens
Nice article. We should ask people wanting to "learn to code" what they mean
and what they hope to get out of it. And in some cases the truth may be that
it will only work if they spend a lot of time learning. If they want to create
a very simple game they can learn game-building tools and use that. But that
will probably not help them build a really advanced game with a scalable back-
end. If that is something they need they might have to spend years learning
and building. Or they might need to get help. Simple web programming is also
easy but it might not lead to the most highly paid jobs directly, if a better
salary is what they are after. It is however a good way to start and you can
learn more about advanced programming or back-end programming later. If they
expect to write the next Halo game by themselves they should probably lower
their expectation a bit. [Edit: spelling]

