i just read it again and every time i do, i want to scream.
no. learning to program is NOT EASY.
and i don't just mean learning to program is easy, it's learning to be good at it that's hard. no.
it is difficult. it is not intuitive. it is logic and we have to put our brains in places human brains don't naturally go.
can anyone learn to do it? yes. but it IS NOT EASY.
@pixelpaperyarn
I think it's more an issue of task segregation. Learning to program is easy, but the background knowledge that allows you to structure an idea in a way that is programmable is hard to build from ground zero.
@Irick i would refute that. there is a layer of background knowledge that's required to do even a simple "hello world".
how to use a computer (which is not intuitive to the uninitiated), the idea of programming in general, the conceptual understanding of the building blocks (variables, functions, etc) are all layers of abstraction required to learn to program.
getting "hello world" on it's own is significant, and even then, there's a world of difference between transcribing & understanding.
@pixelpaperyarn
*nods*
This is partially true, but I would posit that it is only because we have a really, really lapse way of teaching general language skills.
@Irick i would agree with that. computer languages are languages, but i rarely, if ever, see it taught that way. the analogy is rarely apparent until you've been at it a while.
@pixelpaperyarn @Irick I disagree. Words in a true language have semantic value that is highly dependent on context. In a programming language, semantic values are artificially fixed.
@kara_dreamer @pixelpaperyarn
Any turing complete language is by definition recursively enumerable. Or a Type-0 grammar in a Chomsky hierarchy.
@Irick @pixelpaperyarn yeah, but that's like comparing a real fluid to an Euler fluid. The latter is a valid mathematical generalization, but it also doesn't exist.
@kara_dreamer @Irick agreed. i guess at the moment we don't have a better way of describing it.
@kara_dreamer @pixelpaperyarn
It is quite easy to get the sort of natural language contextual ambiguity in a programing language. You see it all the time in interpreted languages with techniques like meta-programing. Which would map to metaphor and slang. However, in programming you must be cognizant of the lattice of implicit associations that you draw on, or else write it into the compiler/interpreter. Or else it won't 'get it'.
@Irick @pixelpaperyarn yeah, I started thinking about this a bit more, and I found myself remembering just what a fearful mess of conditions C code gets to be when you're trying to target every platform at once. talk about your context-sensitive information...
@kara_dreamer @Irick i can see that. i suppose you could view it as a dynamic language of a sort, where word meaning changes over time. the context is rapidly changing.
"language" is not the best analogy, though there is syntax, punctuation, and grammar of a sort.