

Can You Learn To Code In One Day? We Sent A Non-Nerd To Find Out - bennesvig
http://www.fastcompany.com/1801711/cand-you-learn-to-code-in-one-day-we-sent-a-non-nerd-to-find-out

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ScotterC
"The planning session was enlightening because what became obvious is that
it’s easy to describe how you want a user experience to feel--friendly,
welcoming, and so on--but what you specifically want an application to do is
separate from that."

If every non coder could learn this it would save us all a heck of a lot of
time

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rurounijones
Godadmnit, being able to code a bit is no longer "Nerdish", it is fast
becoming an essential skillset that every school leaver should have.

And before all those people come and say "Only a coder would say that" I
include things like people writing various stuff in excel to help their
spreadsheet calculations as coding.

This whole "Anything vaguely technical = Nerd" thing is really getting to me,
maybe I have just been watching the old farts at SOPA to much

~~~
danso
You're completely right...there's no reason why programming can't be as
fundamental as reading and math.

~~~
xibernetik
Except now students leave highschool without a solid background in math as is.
The North American education system should be fixed before new topics get
piled on.

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johngalt
And you can learn to build a house in a day... because you managed to figure
out a tent (with skilled help).

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vectorpush
_Can You Learn To Code In One Day?_

Ultimate HN linkbait.

~~~
bprater
Agreed, the article was mostly fluff.

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jonahj
This is like asking: Can You Learn To Play a Musical Instrument In One Day?
and then sending someone who can't even read sheet music.

Suzuki said, "Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is
skill." In other words, you need to do a lot of coding (including debugging)
to become proficient at it.

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AdamFernandez
I know much of this is the same to the average person, but is it weird that I
cringe a little when I see markup and stylesheets referred to as 'code'?

~~~
simonw
But they /are/ code. They're sequences of characters that get lexically
analysed, parsed in to an abstract syntax tree, executed by an interpreter and
make a computer do stuff. "Code" != "Turing complete"

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Jach
Remember when we had to "program" our VCRs? I kind of share the feeling that
"our word", in this case "code", is being abused and overly simplified, but
overall I don't really care. People are taking the mental effort to design
something in their heads and then realize it by directing the tools available
to them (with some guidance of course); the more of that the better. The main
danger is in leading people to believe that what they did is it.

Sure it's like calling the making of a tune with one of those "press this
object/key to make this sound, that object/key to make that sound" apps (
<http://distoorted.livejournal.com/10914.html> is the most recent one I saw )
"composing", but I can't even work those apps let alone design a pleasing
fugue or canon. Taking 8 hours to be instructed in some very basic musical
theory in that context would probably be beneficial anyway.

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marshray
It sounds like he had a productive day learning, but from the article it's not
clear that he came away with a real appreciation for the fundamental
difference between (HTML and CSS) and Javascript.

I may be biased, but to me the verb "to code" means implementing things that
require Turing completeness to express.

~~~
lubutu
CSS is actually Turing complete: Eli Fox-Epstein used CSS to encode Rule 110,
which was proven by Matthew Cook to be Turing complete.

~~~
finnw
[https://github.com/elitheeli/oddities/blob/master/rule110-gr...](https://github.com/elitheeli/oddities/blob/master/rule110-grid.html)

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moocow01
Can you learn to perform surgery in one day?... yes! but most likely you will
be arrested for murder.

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va_coder
I could take a day long course in marketing and speak like a marketing
exec..so what? That doesn't mean I'd be capable of solving real world
marketing problems.

How about on day 2 the new web coder gets an assignment: The client wants an
ugly picture to cascade in the background of their website and the client is
thinking about moving all their data to Sharepoint because they heard it's
best solution (no matter what the problem). You're job is to deliver the the
correct solution. Go.

~~~
munificent
> I could take a day long course in marketing and speak like a marketing
> exec..so what?

Because if your job entails speaking _to_ marketing execs, now you'll be more
qualified to do so.

Likewise, if a crash course in coding gives you a better ability to talk to
the programmers you work with, that seems like time well spent to me.

~~~
DrStalker
Being able to do lots of things at a very basic level is an immensly valuable
skill, because you can tell quickly what sort of expert you will need and
communicate effectively with them.

Couple this basic understanding with problem solving skills and and you become
able to sit down with subject matter experts and quickly come to a solution to
problems they're stuck on.

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felipemnoa
Replace "Code" with "Play the guitar" and the answer is obvious.

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danso
I think in one day you can learn such things as the fundamental nature of data
bits and the concepts of variables and loops in a day...that sounds lame but
ask a non techie friend if he/she knows that HTML is just a text file. A
depressingly few number of people realize this.

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dlitz
This sort of thing is why Windows/OSX/Unity developers' idea of what's needed
for "usability" is mostly BS. Most people aren't nearly as incapable of
learning this stuff as we like to believe.

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spelunker
Short answer: No.

Long answer:
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

~~~
barrkel
There needs to be a fix for this attack. I suggest inserting spaces in very
long sequences of non-space characters.

~~~
tikhonj
I think an easier fix would be setting the maximum width of each comment to
something (maybe in % and dependent on the level of nesting) and letting
overflow be visible. That should let all the other comments wrap normally
without complicated logic or changing the behavior of posts like this.

Of course, I haven't done much CSS in a while, so I don't remember the
particulars, but the important point is that you can fix this with CSS (I
think).

~~~
barrkel
The way I see it, the alternatives to forcibly wrapping are:

* Overflow that extends into the page margins (looks ugly) and either forces the browser to show a scrollbar, or forces the user to resize the window to view the full text (which may not even be possible).

* Overflow that is contained within the margins, and can only be read by use of nested scrollbars (I hate those, don't you?) or again, by resizing the window to widen the content column width (again, not always possible).

Of all the options, I think forced wrapping is the most visually pleasing.
Whether that can be done with CSS I don't know. I do know that introducing
spaces will do it. Other techniques may involve e.g. Unicode soft hyphen, see
e.g.
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/12/13/10246...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/12/13/10246957.aspx)

Of course, another way to do it is to simply reject the input. That's the way
Slashdot does it.

~~~
zem
> Of course, another way to do it is to simply reject the input. That's the
> way Slashdot does it.

huh. i'm pretty sure i remembered slashdot inserting spaces to break up
pagewidening text, but it's been a good many years so i could be wrong.

~~~
barrkel
I thought so too. I think that's where I got the idea from; that's why I went
off and tested it, but it turns out that's not what they do anymore.

