
You Can't Teach Height, But Can You Teach Programming? - kqr2
http://blogs.msdn.com/steverowe/archive/2007/03/14/you-can-t-teach-height-but-can-you-teach-programming.aspx
======
chibea
_The authors speculate that this is because some people just can't handle the
meaninglessness of programming_

I think he cited the paper wrong here: It's not the meaninglessness of
_programming_ but the meaninglessness of _programs_. And it is obviously not
meant, that a program makes no sense, but that a formalism can stand on its
own, without any purpose. Programming, however, is creating programs for a
purpose, thus, abstracting facts into a formalism and after running the
program interpreting its results is not meaningless at all. I think I can back
the observations of the original paper. I occured people which seem to plainly
don't get what a program does. They are not talking about what they themselves
told the computer to do but they are speculating why the program/computer
isn't doing what it ought to do (what its purpose is).

I disagree with Steve's opinion that the level of abstraction is a general
problem. I started programming early, and I hit walls all the time. Back from
the early times to now I always found things I just couldn't grok. For long
years I couldn't understand programming graphical things at all. I watched
with awe how my three years older neighbor could program animations on his
C64, all I managed to do were Fahrenheit to Celsius converters. Later I was
crazy enough to start learning C++ with only knowing BASIC before. It took
days to get 'Hello World' running. I kept trying and eventually I found the
right book which made me understand OOP. Programming some graphics came very
late. And the list still goes on... I can read a book without understand a
thing. I come back to the book (or suddenly remember details) some weeks,
months, years later and manage to understand what is going on.

The same applies to other areas: Playing piano is something where you hit your
personal wall all the time. Sure, there is a natural anatomical caused level
of virtuosity which simply can't be overcome. (See Robert Schumann, who tried
to hack his weakest finger which ultimately failed) But there are "mental
barriers" which can only be overcome (aside from exercising) by keeping cool
and sometimes stop trying to come back to it later.

Another example: As a child I always divided the physical world from the
living world (the christian heritage?). As such it was for a long time
unthinkable that creatures are made from the same stuff as everything else. I
recall that accepting this knowledge was really hard...

Regarding the original paper (they've done much research, I can only guess and
tell from observation): The humps they observe, couldn't they just be the
indication of a clear mental barrier which has to be overcome? Perhaps being
taught and some pressure is just not enough to grok these abstract facts about
programming? Perhaps, what is needed is just time to (un)consciously chew on
the ideas? So, shouldn't be children exposed to 'some programming stuff' as
early as possible?

In Germany at least it is left to chance when children become exposed to
programming. In most regions there is no teaching at all before a pupil is
about 16 years old (11-th grade).

------
Raphael
First, find yourself some tall parents. Also, make sure to hang out with a
tall crowd. Standing compresses your spine, so spend as much time as possible
in a reclined position. Measure your height every day to track improvements.

------
alan-crowe
The weakness I saw in The Camel Has Two Humps was the lumping together of the
consistently correct and the consistently incorrent. See <http://lambda-the-
ultimate.org/node/1624#comment-19778>

Trying to deduce anything from the success of the consistently correct group
is fraught. It sure looks like they have some prior exposure. The interest
lies in the consistently incorrect group. Perhaps their success points to the
importance of having a consistent model, to be corrected by instruction. Or
perhaps the consistently incorrect group all failed. We don't know how many
were in this group and if there were very few the aggregation of the correct
and incorrect into a single group could completely wash their fate out of the
overall statistics.

------
Confusion
_Most people who take math long enough eventually hit a wall. There is some
point when you can just no longer grasp what is being taught. No matter how
much you study, you'll never become proficient at that level of math._

The argument largely hinges on the truth of this statement and frankly I have
my doubts about its veracity. It seems more likely that people that manage to
master certain math topics can master any topic, because the amount of extra
abstraction introduced levels off.

 _For me, Discrete Math is something I've never been able to master._

I don't see how that subject introduces a huge new abstraction over the
preceding subjects.

~~~
colomon
I dunno, that rang true for me. I have two degrees in math and found most of
what I studied easy, but algebraic topology utterly humiliated me -- it was
just too abstract for me to feel like I had any grasp on what it was talking
about.

------
vorador
I don't think that the analogy is right : after all, when all the players are
more than two meters, short players get an advantage over them.

I don't see why it wouldn't apply to programming.

------
Tichy
Just bad "science".

------
pageman
on the 10,001st hour epiphany BEGINS at least according to
[http://kottke.org/09/05/giving-110-in-defense-of-sports-
inte...](http://kottke.org/09/05/giving-110-in-defense-of-sports-interview-
cliches)

