Why Learn to Program - Can You?
I finally found the article I read back in the 80’s about “Why You Should Learn to Program“, by Chris Crawford, an Atari game developer at the time. Evidently he had spoken on the subject somewhere; afterwards, he put his notes essentially into article form; he then felt it necessary to flesh it out with additional material.
At first glance, though, this seems to clash with the message of Peter Norvig, who either works at or has worked at Google, in his article (which I also find authoritative and based on good research) ” Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years “. These two articles present somewhat contrasting views of the craft of programming; but I find them complementary.
Mr. Norvig’s view is the kind of view that I would expect of professional programmers. He believes that programming that not something that you can learn from a “Learn Language X in 21 Days” kind of approach. In fact, he even mused that 10,000 hours would possibly be a better view of the matter than ten years.
However, in giving his recipe for learning to program, his recipe, which obviously will involve hard work, mentions a very important first step: ” Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.”
He obviously believes it should be fun. And so it should. Even if it comes relatively easily, it will almost certainly bring one a degree of frustration, if for no other reason than that you must, for any nontrivial task, explain what you want to the computer in excruciating detail.
Which brings us to Mr. Crawford’s thesis, consisting of three main ideas on why each of us should learn to program:
1. Recreation.
2. To learn the importance of clear communications.
3. “Learning to program will make you a better thinker.”
I leave you to read the article to get the details of his argument.
Where Mr. Crawford and Mr. Norvig differ are in the goals. Mr. Norvig’s recipe is for a master programmer, who could and would be paid well for mastering his craft- even if he still is doing it for fun. Spending 10,000 hours learning to program is serious stuff.
Mr. Crawford, in contrast, recognizes that there are professional programmers who will be paid well for their work; however, you don’t have to be good enough to write programs for money, to write programs. He gives the illustration of the man who takes pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and his family while on vacation. A professional photographer would likely take a technically “better” picture and put it on a postcard for the man to buy; but he prefers his picture, because he did it himself. A person need not be a master finish carpenter to enjoy doing his own woodwork. As Crawford says, programming is not nuclear physics; anyone can do it.
He recommended BASIC in his article; even he now backs away in this respect from his 1985 recommendation. The Wirthian languages (Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon) might be better choices. There are free Pascal compilers around; if a visual environment is more your speed, try Delphi; you may be able to find earlier versions for free. You can even try Visual Basic, if that suits you. Both BASIC and Pascal were originally designed as teaching languages; if programming interests you, try one of them. (Look for them; Google is your friend.)
The main thing is, the sooner you can get payback for your learning efforts, the better. For me, RPG allowed quick output, quick results at the start. That made up for the times of frustration that could and would come later.
I highly encourage you to read these articles, which give you a good perspective of the entire programming experience. Mr. Crawford, in particular, may just incite you to find out how pleasurable the ability to program can be.