 Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
started 2/26/2002; 9:46:18 AM - last post 3/2/2002; 2:20:52 PM
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Ehud Lamm - Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years 
2/26/2002; 9:46:18 AM (reads: 1740, responses: 4)
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| Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years |
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Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price."
I am sure each of us has his own opinions about leanring how to program (My answer: you either get it, or you don't...), but since this site is dedicated to programming languages I just want to draw your attention to the fact that many of the activities mentioned in this essay are directly related to programming languages: "Learn at least a half dozen programming languages" and "Get involved in a language standardization effort" are just two of them.
Indeed, there's no programming without programming languages. This seems like a trivial statement, but it is one of the few profound truths in CS.
Posted to teaching/learning by Ehud Lamm on 2/26/02; 9:48:34 AM
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Ehud Lamm - Re: Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
2/26/2002; 10:05:13 AM (reads: 1109, responses: 2)
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Norvig write about learning by doing. Some of my views about this (important) approach to learning, can be found in a short essay I wrote some time ago.
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Biep - Re: Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
2/28/2002; 9:50:54 AM (reads: 1092, responses: 1)
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>>"Get involved in a language standardization effort"
>Indeed, there's no programming without programming languages.
>This seems like a trivial statement,
>but it is one of the few profound truths in CS.
I think the biggest benefit of getting involved in standardisation is that you will suddenly learn about fifty more ways in which people use the constructs you thought you knew thoroughly, and that you will be forced to think about the fundamental meaning of concepts on a level of detail that is hard to attain otherwise.
Biep.
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Ehud Lamm - Re: Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
2/28/2002; 10:52:25 AM (reads: 1152, responses: 0)
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Right.
One of the interesting things about languages is that they allow the composition of different constructs, with multiple levels of nesting. That's why an interpreter can be quite short, and the language quite expressive (think LC...).
This is one of the advantages of language based interfaces, as opposed to GUIs, by the way.
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Luke Gorrie - Re: Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
3/2/2002; 2:20:52 PM (reads: 946, responses: 0)
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