These books shouldn't be dismissed since they provide people with a foundation for further learning. They also offer a friendly introduction to programming, rather than imposing an intimidating wall that will keep people away. It is also important to note that these books break the learning into 24 one hour modules, or something similar, so they can have reasonable coverage of a programming language.
If these books have a failing, it has little to do with the concept and everything to do with being poorly written.
Yes, the biggest fault of those books was that the titles were a cheap gimmick. The implication that you could blow through the book in a day and know the language is kind of a lose-lose, because it undersells the difficulty of the lessons to newcomers and sounds patently ridiculous to professionals. Realistically, someone who has no prior programming experience would take more than an hour per lesson, and would probably take a month or two to get through the book, like any other first-time programming tutorial.
My first exposure to programming was Sam's Teach Yourself C++ In 24 Hours from a used bookstore in my early teens. I didn't stick with it for more than a couple chapters but compiling a program that printed "Hello world" was a magical experience.
Ha, I got that same book from the public library in my early teens.
I never completed it at the time either, though it created a foundation that enabled me to learn action script (Adobe flash) with relative ease and ultimately go on to complete a computer science degree despite pressure from my high school teachers to go into mechanical engineering or similar.
On balance I got to pursue something that genuinely interested me and happened to pay well and I'll always have a fond memory of the Sam's book, as well as the free Ubuntu CDs that got me onto Linux years before we got broadband
There was a time in the 90s when you actually could breeze through a book and know the language. Not Perl, obviously ;)
I won’t attest to the quality of your mental software architecture, but you’ll know the language…
It was around the time C++03 came that things no longer fit in a single book and you need a bookshelf of books to know a thing.
The web circa 2001 was easy enough to build entire sites from scratch in a week with no frameworks. The web circa 2021 was a complicated mess of frameworks on frameworks rediscovering server side rendering (the OG method) again.
I’m a fan of the books that take you through a project start to finish and not chunk it up into mini exercises.
The essay is not critical of the contents of these books, but rather of their titles. And I agree with that sentiment. The titles are the clickbait of their time.
You never say that you become good at programming.
You let other people in the field say it. And that happens when it becomes accountable. For some it happens early in their career. For others, entire careers end and the words have never been said.
Humility and a desire to continually improve is, of course, essential in everything in life. But false humility - eg spending 52 years doing something and refusing to recognize some degree of skill - is just as bad as the lack of it. (I'm not saying the original commenter said this, but rather the people who responded in this vein)
And I say this while thoroughly enjoying a quote by one of the comedy greats, George Carlin, where he was quoted a legendary cellist, Pablo Casals, who kept practicing daily into his 90s, saying "I'm beginning to notice some improvement".
Recognizing your skill while also recognizing (perhaps even immense) potential for improvement are not mutually exclusive.
Not parent, but after a couple of "finished", functioning projects. I still do not consider myself "good", I lack self-esteem, severely so. I believe everyone is better than I am, even if I am told otherwise. Unfortunately no matter who praises me, that praise has no effect on me. It is really debilitating though, as it stops me from having a job I would be good at, and that pays well, which I really do need as I have MS so my options are severely limited and the expenses keep piling up due to my illness.
Anyone who claims they're good at programming is still learning. We're all just, more comfortable with nuances but still really bad at it. Programming rocks to do things correctly is hard.
I think it's fine to be "good at programming" given a specific context. If your neighbour says "Hey, my daughter likes computers and thinks she might want to program them as a career, are you any good at that?" then sure, whatever, you're good at programming and can send her some links to get started. If your coworker asks if you're any good with databases and you know he's learning SQL for the first time, then sure, whatever, you're good with databases and can teach him about CTEs.
I get that humility is a virtue, but at some point you have to admit that you're capable of doing a piece of work.
Yeah, my question was are you "good", not are you the "greatest" programmer.
Humility is absolutely necessary in any skill development (and in general), but false humility - such as has been on display by various responses - is just as bad as the lack of it.
never though id be good at programming. doing it for 20+ years now, not fulltime.
still feel like that lil kid. other ppls program humble me and teach me how little i know.
sure i understand more than i did when i started, but theres various reasons you're never 'there', and to me, i wonder if feeling you are good would even benefit you.
sure, you can still program C like in the 90s. Still write python like its on v2, or html and CSS like its 1999, but in reality to tap into the systems and their potential you need to constantly keep up. and i think its pretty much impossible to keep up with everything. there is so much, and more and more every day...
im a bad programmer. my bugs sometimes compute stuff!
My point is not to presume the competence of others (which, frankly, I don't care about outside of like Knuth and "are you making my life harder at work"), but to point out we should establish our own view of whether we're competent enough based on what our goals are. People tell me I'm a good programmer; I don't really see it. This used to bother me. It doesn't anymore because I've found other things to enjoy in life.
If you've been finding elegant solutions to complex problems for a while and you feel like everything kinda repeats itself. (I'm not that good, still encountering completely new problems)
I'm a zoomer dev and I have a question.
The article here linked to google groups - https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.jwz
"Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable."
I've never even heard of google groups, and it's crazy to read conversations nearly as old as me.
What is/was UseNet? Was that the precursor to php bulletin boards in way / the forums of the 90s - 2000s? Would the zoomer equivalent be discord for my generation?
Usenet was a decentralized forum where anybody could participate and nobody could be banned. Despite this, the quality of discussion was usually very high. The user interfaces supported rather comprehensive threading and filtering capabilities, so you could block the people you wished you could ban. It was sort of destroyed by spam (since spammers couldn't be banned) but doesn't have much spam anymore because it's too obscure for spammers to bother with.
There isn't a Zoomer equivalent, because the internet has been locked down since then, and anyone who attempts to offer an uncensored and uncensorable forum gets brigaded and maybe swatted, then cut off from the banking system.
Probably the closest modern equivalent to Usenet is Reddit--each newsgroup is roughly kind of like a subreddit, and, like Reddit, threading is quite the norm in newsgroups. The main difference is that Usenet wasn't centrally organized, messages tended to be rather longer than Reddit posts, and it's possible to cross-post on Usenet (post to multiple newsgroups with one message) in a way that it isn't on Reddit.
(The pre-web antecedent of Discord would be IRC, latterly stuff like AOL chat rooms.)
And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.
> And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.
I first read the Apollo transcripts when I was maybe 8 or 10 years old - this was deep into the 1980s but the Apollo missions were still before my time. Reading such material at 8 or 10 didn't feel unusual.
Now, rereading as I near 50, they are surreal. The conversations, and the moon itself, have not changed one bit. But myself and the world around me are unrecognisable to the 10 year old me still reading over my shoulder.
Messages on Usenet did not, at least in the mid-1990s when I spent too much of every day on it, tend to be longer than Reddit posts. Reddit has better posts than Usenet.
Am I not allowed to start a conversation thread on a website where I specifically know there's many old developers who were around for that era? Of course I could use google or gpt - this is more informative.
I didn't say anything about what you're allowed to do.
"this is more informative"
As someone who was on usenet before it was even called that, I can authoritatively say that it isn't. I can tell you that many of the claims here are false ... e.g., someone claimed that the name "usenet" came from news organizations in 1993/1994, but in fact the name was voted on at a 1982 USENIX conference (and I was present and voted).
I'm not hating on anyone, fundamentally dishonest person.
P.S. I helped develop the ARPANET and my name is mentioned in RFC 57.
P.P.S. My comment included the Wikipedia link ... so much for having something useful to add ... I did, you apparently don't. The whole idea that asking HN--a form of social media with all of its problems--is asking experts but reading Wikipedia (not a "conventional communication channel")--written/curated/edited by experts isn't is completely nuts.
"Usenet" has a wikipedia page which describes the network quite well. I used it in the late 2000s, not just for discussion as some groups were also hosting warez. Pretty sure you can still go there although it's unclear you'll get the post quality of the 80s-90s (back when I read discussions it was already a lot of trolling).
Usenet groups pre-dated the web. There were "discussion" groups like alt.startrek. However, by volume, uunet was extremely popular for distributing pictures like for desktop wallpaper. It was also 100% accessible by dialup modem, which would connect on a schedule and download updates from your upstream server. I connected two companies to the Internet between 1991-1993, and uunet was one use, email was the other. Small-ish ISP's around 1991-1994 usually accommodated uunet for business accounts. Our ISP was notable due to if someone complained about a post, they required the complaint to be made in writing/fax, and you had to provide your name and address.
Usenet is still around and still fairly active, though by volume its probably more commonly used as the originating source for anything torrented nowadays. PHP bulletin boards is a good approximation if you squint. If you imagine being on a large number of topical mailing lists all filtered into their own inboxes you wouldn't be far off.
A classic interaction from Usenet (I suspect the Reddit comparison is apt), was someone coming upon a really nasty fight between a couple of trol- er, users.
They expressed horror, and said something to the effect of “My god! I came to discuss cats!”.
Another user commented something along the lines of “You have mistaken this forum for a place to exchange information. It is not. It is a public toilet. Jump on in.”
The newsgroups, a.k.a. net news, were the front page of the internet -- more so than Reddit ever was -- till the web started taking off in the very early 1990s. The only other service that might lay claim to that title would be IRC (Internet Relay Chat), but net news probably had about twice as many users.
The big difference between those two services and the web was that most participants used text-only software (in terminals) to access them. Actually an even bigger difference is that (like all the other services on the internet back then) net news and IRC were run by volunteers.
The average IQ on the internet back then was more than 130 (whereas of course today it is in the range of 102 to 105) -- and it was 98% or 99% men and much more libertarian than today. One thing that hasn't changed is that people back then tended to spent much more time on the internet (particularly, on the newsgroups, IRC, text-only MMORPGs) than is good for them.
It was always called the newsgroups or "net news": calling it Usenet was started by the news industry when they started explaining the internet to the world in 1993 and 1994 because obviously "net news" is a horrible name (in their minds) for any service or scene that they did not control.
More precisely, the newsgroups began on what is basically a "competitor" to the internet called Usenet, then migrated to the internet, so "Usenet news", i.e., that news-like service that started on Usenet, is not a terrible name for it, but "Usenet" by itself is kind of a bad name because it already meant something different, namely, this network (now probably long gone) that carried email and other services in addition to newsgroups.
I already did that. But can you please do a better job of sticking to the HN guidelines? I'm in awe of your involvement in computing history, but you've also posted quite a few comments that break the rules here, which is not cool.
> In 2001, Norvig published a short article titled Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years,[20] arguing against the fashionable introductory programming textbooks that purported to teach programming in days or weeks. The article was widely shared and discussed, and has attracted contributed translations to over 20 languages.[20]
Anyone who followed this article would've greatly threatened their chances of being hired by Google, since they would've spent their time on things other than rehearsing for the interviews.
No, the book is not about rehearsing you for interviews. In contrary, the book emphasizes on the mastery of your tech which books rehearsing you for interviews neither claim nor can do.
The whole idea of the book is to get deep insight into your tech following the 10 000 hours rule which one might achieve within 10 years of practice.
It was published against the mainstream idea of that time advertised under the name "Teach Yourself Something In 24 Hours". This book is a call for hard work, mastery and is against rushing when learning.
Op means that if they followed Norvig’s advice they wouldn’t be hired by Google, because they’d be studying actual programming instead of rehearsing Leetcode for interviews.
As someone who's been hired by Google twice, I'm very happy that I spent 99% of my time actually programming. (I did a day or two of Leetcode before the second time, just to make sure I was appropriately calibrated. It didn't exist before the first time.)
I don’t know what interviewing at Google is like now but I interviewed for Google in 2008 (no offer) and 2012 (offer) and the questions on both occasions were not of the nature that leetcode could have helped with much.
I don't think it necessarily leads to a of mastery of data structures and algorithms in the context of leetcode/modern coding interviews. One can do a lot of coding, and even be paid for it, for years and just not even encounter a lot of this material. Though one will have developed much of the same intuition that you typically acquire in a data structures class, it doesn't necessarily mean you're prepared to code mergesort on a whiteboard.
You're right about the "Teach yourself X in Y days" books.
I should've given some additional context in my comment:
The author of this article was heading Google engineering (back when Google was cool), but when the Google engineering interviews seemed to have little or nothing to do with the advice in this article.
Personal attacks like this are not allowed on HN, no matter what you're replying to. I can personally agree that the criticism of the article is silly, but that doesn't warrant these kinds of personal swipes, which break multiple guidelines.
HN is only a place where people want to participate because many people make an effort to keep the standards up, so please do your part if you want to be a participant here.
Very confusing to read the article labelled as 1998 and have references for newer stuff (e.g. Ratatouile).
The biggest one for me is to recommend a bunch of 98-propiate languages (C++) and then recommend Go!
I guess that the article has been slightly updated, but it felt weird. In another language I checked the references are older.
Are there mechanisms which make learning programming significantly easier which don't have marked limitations? (e.g., the limitations of BASIC (esp. early imprlementations) vs. C)
I find it striking that this article references
Brooks, Fred, No Silver Bullets, IEEE Computer, vol. 20, no. 4, 1987, p. 10-19.
but doesn't cite one of the more notable responses:
It seems you're conflating "easy to write complex software" with "easy to learn how to program." Just because you're using a language/environment that offers more powerful, high-level features doesn't mean you're learning more. If anything, being forced to learn the low-level stuff probably gives you a deeper understanding of programming, even if your output is lower in the beginning.
After all this time, I am not all that convinced that Object Oriented Programming was all that much of a sliver bullet. Its impact is less that Cox claimed, in my opinion.
I was curious about this too, so I went looking. I found this video from about a year ago. He seems cautiously optimistic.
The second half is a Q&A and he directly addresses this: in the presence of errors he finds more faults in the way the prompt was worded than in how the LLM answers, and figures that LLMs are better than the alternative approaches to programming if used well.
I've been at it for over 30 years. Still learning.
You can learn fast today, and then continue tomorrow, and next month, and next year, and if you remain curious, half a lifetime later you are still learning.
Calling Norvig's insights garbage says a lot about you. How did you ever come with that strawman?
> If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on your own or on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough
Where exactly does Norvig advocate not to have a career earlier?
> ... says a lot about you. How did you ever come with that strawman?
Please don't include personal swipes like this in comments on HN. The parent's comment was needlessly dismissive, but someone else's bad comment does not justify a bad comment in reply.
To be honest, I've lost faith in HN not being reddit like because I've seen the similar hive mind mass labeling of "wrongthink", specially when it came to covid policies, US/NATO warmongering, and advocating for what once was standard hacker culture around freedom and equality of individuals.
I expect you'd propose that this is still a place where we can have the civil discussions and should not get in these flame wars so I'll try it your way for a while and see how it goes.
A MAANG company refused to give me an interview because ‘this position is for people with bsc degrees’ when i had an associate’s. Degree is mandatory unless its Stanford at which point you can enjoy VC money hacking on the next AI slop generator. Don't believe me, take a look at [1], minimum qualification is a BsC degree for a Google SWE job.
He is implying rushing is bad, it’s not. Tech industry is so enamored with young people that learning Next.js and making a dog app is deemed superior than really getting into the nitty gritty.
It’s a career track based on hype cycles and ageism.
My ability to get interviews at 22 even without a degree was orders of magnitude higher than it is now despite being 20x more competent.
> My ability to get interviews at 22 even without a degree was orders of magnitude higher than it is now despite being 20x more competent.
Then you're doing something very wrong. Also, you may be comparing apples to oranges if you're comparing across different economic condition and seniority roles.
In any case, I think this paragraph says a lot
> He is implying rushing is bad, it’s not. Tech industry is so enamored with young people that learning Next.js and making a dog app is deemed superior than really getting into the nitty gritty.
You're maybe selling yourself poorly or in the wrong places if this is what you see. Maybe your "nitty gritty" doesn't actually solve the customers problem or, if they're solving the wrong problem you're not effective at showing them what they should solve instead and why should they hire you for it.
Norvig's point about acquired wisdom over time is great and your quips sound like a you problem.
>Maybe your "nitty gritty" doesn't actually solve the customers problem or,
Yes, exactly, which is why I mentioned written a dog pic sharing app in Next.js is superior to reading Knuth. The implied meritocracy doesn't exist in tech. It's filled with biased monochromatic idiots who basically have ideas like 'bad experience is worse than no experience' which is euphemism for we don't hire people older than 26.
>Norvig's point about acquired wisdom over time is great and your quips sound like a you problem.
Only in tech does experience confer a disadvantage. Even in professional sports at 40 Lebron James is still playing. In tech, at 40 you are a dinasour and your career is done and dusted for.
I have yet to see a career path more pretentious, more focused on never ending peacocking and mimicry, ageism, language-ism, unstable and filled with unoriginality of a perverse kind. Go on X to see thousands of tech people having exactly the same personality with anime pfps who magically think the same and are in never ending Nirvana because of LLMs.
I just realized you had just 2 years of experience and are disappointed that you seemingly had more opportunities at 22 without a degree that at 26+ with one. Your self portrayal made me think of someone with ample experience.
I see how, if you're not a certain age with a certain amount of experience, you may find people being unnecessarily dismissive.
I understand the frustration but would say that you need to change that attitude because it's not just unhelpful but you're also wrong.
If you do have passion about software you can make a good living out of it but need to sell yourself and know how to show value to customers. Age won't really matter if you are able to tell a good story. Getting the first jobs is the toughest part. Then you start understanding how.
Lose social media if it gets you down. It's not an indicator of anything. Go to therapy. Find stuff where you have passion and pursue that.
Nothing is guaranteed. I'm sorry you feel lied to or something but there's absolutely an amazing time to be had if you pursue and do what you love.
Ah yes, but of course Norvig never had access to current generation LLMs, which do let you learn C++ in 24 hours! No need to understand the memory hierarchy, the LLM will produce perfectly performant code right out of the box.
With LLMs you can iterate through a hundred thousand software development lifecycles in a month, vastly increasing your rate of project experience gain.
This article is so obsolete, it's literally from the previous century.
You don’t learn C++ in 24 hours. An LLM merely allows you to produce code at a higher complexity much sooner. This is a death sentence for a novice’s understanding.
LLMs are tools that can accelerate learning, but they don't replace the deep understanding and pattern recognition that comes from years of solving real problems and making mistakes.
Heh, no wonder you are getting downvoted. Did you actually learn anything this way? This post is about learning and not how fast you can generate code, generating with LLM's is not learning. Then when you have not learnt anything but you generate LLM code that looks great but you cannot debug it because you never learnt programming and have to rely on the LLM, you have problems. Much like the CEO who vibe coded on replit and lost his production DB.
My point is that most of that learning is not necessary! Does a JavaScript bootcamp developer know what the fuck a memory hierarchy is? malloc? No! Do they need to? Also no! This ignorance stops absolutely nobody from identifying as a Senior Staff Architect with 16 weeks of experience, closing Jiras at 10x the velocity as these fools with crippling debt and a computer science degree.
These books shouldn't be dismissed since they provide people with a foundation for further learning. They also offer a friendly introduction to programming, rather than imposing an intimidating wall that will keep people away. It is also important to note that these books break the learning into 24 one hour modules, or something similar, so they can have reasonable coverage of a programming language.
If these books have a failing, it has little to do with the concept and everything to do with being poorly written.
Yes, the biggest fault of those books was that the titles were a cheap gimmick. The implication that you could blow through the book in a day and know the language is kind of a lose-lose, because it undersells the difficulty of the lessons to newcomers and sounds patently ridiculous to professionals. Realistically, someone who has no prior programming experience would take more than an hour per lesson, and would probably take a month or two to get through the book, like any other first-time programming tutorial.
My first exposure to programming was Sam's Teach Yourself C++ In 24 Hours from a used bookstore in my early teens. I didn't stick with it for more than a couple chapters but compiling a program that printed "Hello world" was a magical experience.
Ha, I got that same book from the public library in my early teens.
I never completed it at the time either, though it created a foundation that enabled me to learn action script (Adobe flash) with relative ease and ultimately go on to complete a computer science degree despite pressure from my high school teachers to go into mechanical engineering or similar.
On balance I got to pursue something that genuinely interested me and happened to pay well and I'll always have a fond memory of the Sam's book, as well as the free Ubuntu CDs that got me onto Linux years before we got broadband
Edit: it wasn't teach yourself in 24 hours, it was the 21 days version (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sams-Teach-Yourself-21-Days/dp/0672...)
There was a time in the 90s when you actually could breeze through a book and know the language. Not Perl, obviously ;)
I won’t attest to the quality of your mental software architecture, but you’ll know the language…
It was around the time C++03 came that things no longer fit in a single book and you need a bookshelf of books to know a thing.
The web circa 2001 was easy enough to build entire sites from scratch in a week with no frameworks. The web circa 2021 was a complicated mess of frameworks on frameworks rediscovering server side rendering (the OG method) again.
I’m a fan of the books that take you through a project start to finish and not chunk it up into mini exercises.
The essay is not critical of the contents of these books, but rather of their titles. And I agree with that sentiment. The titles are the clickbait of their time.
The point is that there are better books to start with. The title sets unrealistic expectations.
https://devhumor.com/media/how-to-teach-yourself-c-in-21-day...
The comic might have been insightful had it stopped at the third panel.
Previously:
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39001755 - Jan 2024 (302 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33287618 - Oct 2022 (112 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27411276 - June 2021 (115 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543495 - July 2019 (87 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16574248 - March 2018 (51 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9395284 - April 2015 (61 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519158 - April 2013 (86 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3439772 - Jan 2012 (29 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191235 - May 2008 (19 comments)
Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243 - Aug 2007 (7 comments)
I've been doing it for 52 years (with a gap during the late 70s) and still teaching myself new things.
At what point would you say that you became "good" at programming?
You never say that you become good at programming.
You let other people in the field say it. And that happens when it becomes accountable. For some it happens early in their career. For others, entire careers end and the words have never been said.
Humility and a desire to continually improve is, of course, essential in everything in life. But false humility - eg spending 52 years doing something and refusing to recognize some degree of skill - is just as bad as the lack of it. (I'm not saying the original commenter said this, but rather the people who responded in this vein)
And I say this while thoroughly enjoying a quote by one of the comedy greats, George Carlin, where he was quoted a legendary cellist, Pablo Casals, who kept practicing daily into his 90s, saying "I'm beginning to notice some improvement".
Recognizing your skill while also recognizing (perhaps even immense) potential for improvement are not mutually exclusive.
[dead]
Not parent, but after a couple of "finished", functioning projects. I still do not consider myself "good", I lack self-esteem, severely so. I believe everyone is better than I am, even if I am told otherwise. Unfortunately no matter who praises me, that praise has no effect on me. It is really debilitating though, as it stops me from having a job I would be good at, and that pays well, which I really do need as I have MS so my options are severely limited and the expenses keep piling up due to my illness.
Anyone who claims they're good at programming is still learning. We're all just, more comfortable with nuances but still really bad at it. Programming rocks to do things correctly is hard.
I think it's fine to be "good at programming" given a specific context. If your neighbour says "Hey, my daughter likes computers and thinks she might want to program them as a career, are you any good at that?" then sure, whatever, you're good at programming and can send her some links to get started. If your coworker asks if you're any good with databases and you know he's learning SQL for the first time, then sure, whatever, you're good with databases and can teach him about CTEs.
I get that humility is a virtue, but at some point you have to admit that you're capable of doing a piece of work.
Yeah, my question was are you "good", not are you the "greatest" programmer.
Humility is absolutely necessary in any skill development (and in general), but false humility - such as has been on display by various responses - is just as bad as the lack of it.
never though id be good at programming. doing it for 20+ years now, not fulltime.
still feel like that lil kid. other ppls program humble me and teach me how little i know.
sure i understand more than i did when i started, but theres various reasons you're never 'there', and to me, i wonder if feeling you are good would even benefit you.
sure, you can still program C like in the 90s. Still write python like its on v2, or html and CSS like its 1999, but in reality to tap into the systems and their potential you need to constantly keep up. and i think its pretty much impossible to keep up with everything. there is so much, and more and more every day...
im a bad programmer. my bugs sometimes compute stuff!
How do you define "good" at programming? Better than you were yesterday? Able to write code without looking up anything? More capable than a newbie?
One test is that you build a system that works and solves some problem, and that it keeps working.
When it puts food on the table.
You can put food with barely any knowledge, just automating a few things. More true now with vibe coding, not sure in 3-4 years.
More of an "ai operation" skill than being a good programmer, but yea that works
That's an awfully profit-scoped way to frame human competence and assumes profit as the end goal. What about hobbyists?
My point is not to presume the competence of others (which, frankly, I don't care about outside of like Knuth and "are you making my life harder at work"), but to point out we should establish our own view of whether we're competent enough based on what our goals are. People tell me I'm a good programmer; I don't really see it. This used to bother me. It doesn't anymore because I've found other things to enjoy in life.
Does ramen 7 days/wk count as food on the table?
Absolutely.
You become good at learning what you need; and also become a bit humble and avoid presuming you know best just because you've learened some things.
If you've been finding elegant solutions to complex problems for a while and you feel like everything kinda repeats itself. (I'm not that good, still encountering completely new problems)
I'm a zoomer dev and I have a question. The article here linked to google groups - https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.jwz "Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable." I've never even heard of google groups, and it's crazy to read conversations nearly as old as me.
What is/was UseNet? Was that the precursor to php bulletin boards in way / the forums of the 90s - 2000s? Would the zoomer equivalent be discord for my generation?
Usenet was a decentralized forum where anybody could participate and nobody could be banned. Despite this, the quality of discussion was usually very high. The user interfaces supported rather comprehensive threading and filtering capabilities, so you could block the people you wished you could ban. It was sort of destroyed by spam (since spammers couldn't be banned) but doesn't have much spam anymore because it's too obscure for spammers to bother with.
There isn't a Zoomer equivalent, because the internet has been locked down since then, and anyone who attempts to offer an uncensored and uncensorable forum gets brigaded and maybe swatted, then cut off from the banking system.
But Usenet still exists.
Probably the closest modern equivalent to Usenet is Reddit--each newsgroup is roughly kind of like a subreddit, and, like Reddit, threading is quite the norm in newsgroups. The main difference is that Usenet wasn't centrally organized, messages tended to be rather longer than Reddit posts, and it's possible to cross-post on Usenet (post to multiple newsgroups with one message) in a way that it isn't on Reddit.
(The pre-web antecedent of Discord would be IRC, latterly stuff like AOL chat rooms.)
And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.
Now, rereading as I near 50, they are surreal. The conversations, and the moon itself, have not changed one bit. But myself and the world around me are unrecognisable to the 10 year old me still reading over my shoulder.
Messages on Usenet did not, at least in the mid-1990s when I spent too much of every day on it, tend to be longer than Reddit posts. Reddit has better posts than Usenet.
They were if you count all the binaries.
Are zoomers incapable of looking things up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
Am I not allowed to start a conversation thread on a website where I specifically know there's many old developers who were around for that era? Of course I could use google or gpt - this is more informative.
I didn't say anything about what you're allowed to do.
"this is more informative"
As someone who was on usenet before it was even called that, I can authoritatively say that it isn't. I can tell you that many of the claims here are false ... e.g., someone claimed that the name "usenet" came from news organizations in 1993/1994, but in fact the name was voted on at a 1982 USENIX conference (and I was present and voted).
Wikipedia isn’t as prominent as it was in my day, and Google isn’t as good.
Even if true this isn't relevant.
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Totally false things are clear to you? Ah well.
I'm not hating on anyone, fundamentally dishonest person.
P.S. I helped develop the ARPANET and my name is mentioned in RFC 57.
P.P.S. My comment included the Wikipedia link ... so much for having something useful to add ... I did, you apparently don't. The whole idea that asking HN--a form of social media with all of its problems--is asking experts but reading Wikipedia (not a "conventional communication channel")--written/curated/edited by experts isn't is completely nuts.
"Usenet" has a wikipedia page which describes the network quite well. I used it in the late 2000s, not just for discussion as some groups were also hosting warez. Pretty sure you can still go there although it's unclear you'll get the post quality of the 80s-90s (back when I read discussions it was already a lot of trolling).
Usenet groups pre-dated the web. There were "discussion" groups like alt.startrek. However, by volume, uunet was extremely popular for distributing pictures like for desktop wallpaper. It was also 100% accessible by dialup modem, which would connect on a schedule and download updates from your upstream server. I connected two companies to the Internet between 1991-1993, and uunet was one use, email was the other. Small-ish ISP's around 1991-1994 usually accommodated uunet for business accounts. Our ISP was notable due to if someone complained about a post, they required the complaint to be made in writing/fax, and you had to provide your name and address.
Usenet is still around and still fairly active, though by volume its probably more commonly used as the originating source for anything torrented nowadays. PHP bulletin boards is a good approximation if you squint. If you imagine being on a large number of topical mailing lists all filtered into their own inboxes you wouldn't be far off.
A classic interaction from Usenet (I suspect the Reddit comparison is apt), was someone coming upon a really nasty fight between a couple of trol- er, users.
They expressed horror, and said something to the effect of “My god! I came to discuss cats!”.
Another user commented something along the lines of “You have mistaken this forum for a place to exchange information. It is not. It is a public toilet. Jump on in.”
The newsgroups, a.k.a. net news, were the front page of the internet -- more so than Reddit ever was -- till the web started taking off in the very early 1990s. The only other service that might lay claim to that title would be IRC (Internet Relay Chat), but net news probably had about twice as many users.
The big difference between those two services and the web was that most participants used text-only software (in terminals) to access them. Actually an even bigger difference is that (like all the other services on the internet back then) net news and IRC were run by volunteers.
The average IQ on the internet back then was more than 130 (whereas of course today it is in the range of 102 to 105) -- and it was 98% or 99% men and much more libertarian than today. One thing that hasn't changed is that people back then tended to spent much more time on the internet (particularly, on the newsgroups, IRC, text-only MMORPGs) than is good for them.
It was always called the newsgroups or "net news": calling it Usenet was started by the news industry when they started explaining the internet to the world in 1993 and 1994 because obviously "net news" is a horrible name (in their minds) for any service or scene that they did not control.
More precisely, the newsgroups began on what is basically a "competitor" to the internet called Usenet, then migrated to the internet, so "Usenet news", i.e., that news-like service that started on Usenet, is not a terrible name for it, but "Usenet" by itself is kind of a bad name because it already meant something different, namely, this network (now probably long gone) that carried email and other services in addition to newsgroups.
"calling it Usenet was started by the news industry"
This, along with several of your other claims, is a fabrication. I actually participated in the vote on the name at the 1982 USENIX conference.
Wow!
As long as you're here ... can I have whatever sort of limit you have on me lifted, please?
I already did that. But can you please do a better job of sticking to the HN guidelines? I'm in awe of your involvement in computing history, but you've also posted quite a few comments that break the rules here, which is not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thank you. I will study those rules and work to be a better HN citizen. Thanks for giving me the opportunity, and for calling me out appropriately.
For programming-specific contexts I think StackOverflow might be the better equivalent.
> In 2001, Norvig published a short article titled Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years,[20] arguing against the fashionable introductory programming textbooks that purported to teach programming in days or weeks. The article was widely shared and discussed, and has attracted contributed translations to over 20 languages.[20]
Anyone who followed this article would've greatly threatened their chances of being hired by Google, since they would've spent their time on things other than rehearsing for the interviews.
No, the book is not about rehearsing you for interviews. In contrary, the book emphasizes on the mastery of your tech which books rehearsing you for interviews neither claim nor can do.
The whole idea of the book is to get deep insight into your tech following the 10 000 hours rule which one might achieve within 10 years of practice.
It was published against the mainstream idea of that time advertised under the name "Teach Yourself Something In 24 Hours". This book is a call for hard work, mastery and is against rushing when learning.
Op means that if they followed Norvig’s advice they wouldn’t be hired by Google, because they’d be studying actual programming instead of rehearsing Leetcode for interviews.
As someone who's been hired by Google twice, I'm very happy that I spent 99% of my time actually programming. (I did a day or two of Leetcode before the second time, just to make sure I was appropriately calibrated. It didn't exist before the first time.)
I don’t know what interviewing at Google is like now but I interviewed for Google in 2008 (no offer) and 2012 (offer) and the questions on both occasions were not of the nature that leetcode could have helped with much.
You are right. Thank you.
On the other hand, mastery through 10 years of practice means and leads to a good knowledge of data structures and algorithms.
I don't think it necessarily leads to a of mastery of data structures and algorithms in the context of leetcode/modern coding interviews. One can do a lot of coding, and even be paid for it, for years and just not even encounter a lot of this material. Though one will have developed much of the same intuition that you typically acquire in a data structures class, it doesn't necessarily mean you're prepared to code mergesort on a whiteboard.
You're right about the "Teach yourself X in Y days" books.
I should've given some additional context in my comment:
The author of this article was heading Google engineering (back when Google was cool), but when the Google engineering interviews seemed to have little or nothing to do with the advice in this article.
Getting hired by Google isn't the end-goal of learning programming.
Same joke, published in 1999: "learn greek in 25 years". Wonder if this inspired Norvig.
https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Greek-Years-Brian-Church/dp/960...
It seems the irony has been mostly lost. Gave me a chuckle. :)
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Personal attacks like this are not allowed on HN, no matter what you're replying to. I can personally agree that the criticism of the article is silly, but that doesn't warrant these kinds of personal swipes, which break multiple guidelines.
HN is only a place where people want to participate because many people make an effort to keep the standards up, so please do your part if you want to be a participant here.
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Very confusing to read the article labelled as 1998 and have references for newer stuff (e.g. Ratatouile). The biggest one for me is to recommend a bunch of 98-propiate languages (C++) and then recommend Go! I guess that the article has been slightly updated, but it felt weird. In another language I checked the references are older.
The copyright notice in the footer has the year range 2001-2014. Presumably the timespan that the essay went through various edits.
Are there mechanisms which make learning programming significantly easier which don't have marked limitations? (e.g., the limitations of BASIC (esp. early imprlementations) vs. C)
I find it striking that this article references
Brooks, Fred, No Silver Bullets, IEEE Computer, vol. 20, no. 4, 1987, p. 10-19.
but doesn't cite one of the more notable responses:
https://drdobbs.com/there-is-a-silver-bullet/184407534/
where that language (Objective C) coupled with the NeXT libraries/objects made possible Steve Jobs' "5-minute Word Processor Demo"
Do Swift (and SwiftUI) change this calculus?
It seems you're conflating "easy to write complex software" with "easy to learn how to program." Just because you're using a language/environment that offers more powerful, high-level features doesn't mean you're learning more. If anything, being forced to learn the low-level stuff probably gives you a deeper understanding of programming, even if your output is lower in the beginning.
After all this time, I am not all that convinced that Object Oriented Programming was all that much of a sliver bullet. Its impact is less that Cox claimed, in my opinion.
The joy of seeing Times New Roman, HTML and CSS.
I'll finish the article in 24 hrs - 10 years approx.
Does anyone know how Norvig thinks about the use of LLMs for programming?
I was curious about this too, so I went looking. I found this video from about a year ago. He seems cautiously optimistic.
The second half is a Q&A and he directly addresses this: in the presence of errors he finds more faults in the way the prompt was worded than in how the LLM answers, and figures that LLMs are better than the alternative approaches to programming if used well.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ia6aJIplmtc
1998
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Teach%20Yourself%20Programming...
I've been at it for over 30 years. Still learning.
You can learn fast today, and then continue tomorrow, and next month, and next year, and if you remain curious, half a lifetime later you are still learning.
Discussion from 2007:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243
I have seen book teaching programming in 21 days and few YouTubers in 1 hour of video.
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Calling Norvig's insights garbage says a lot about you. How did you ever come with that strawman?
> If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on your own or on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough
Where exactly does Norvig advocate not to have a career earlier?
> ... says a lot about you. How did you ever come with that strawman?
Please don't include personal swipes like this in comments on HN. The parent's comment was needlessly dismissive, but someone else's bad comment does not justify a bad comment in reply.
To be honest, I've lost faith in HN not being reddit like because I've seen the similar hive mind mass labeling of "wrongthink", specially when it came to covid policies, US/NATO warmongering, and advocating for what once was standard hacker culture around freedom and equality of individuals.
I expect you'd propose that this is still a place where we can have the civil discussions and should not get in these flame wars so I'll try it your way for a while and see how it goes.
You pointed exactly at the garbage.
A MAANG company refused to give me an interview because ‘this position is for people with bsc degrees’ when i had an associate’s. Degree is mandatory unless its Stanford at which point you can enjoy VC money hacking on the next AI slop generator. Don't believe me, take a look at [1], minimum qualification is a BsC degree for a Google SWE job.
He is implying rushing is bad, it’s not. Tech industry is so enamored with young people that learning Next.js and making a dog app is deemed superior than really getting into the nitty gritty.
It’s a career track based on hype cycles and ageism.
My ability to get interviews at 22 even without a degree was orders of magnitude higher than it is now despite being 20x more competent.
[1]: https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/resul...
No it isn't.
> My ability to get interviews at 22 even without a degree was orders of magnitude higher than it is now despite being 20x more competent.
Then you're doing something very wrong. Also, you may be comparing apples to oranges if you're comparing across different economic condition and seniority roles.
In any case, I think this paragraph says a lot
> He is implying rushing is bad, it’s not. Tech industry is so enamored with young people that learning Next.js and making a dog app is deemed superior than really getting into the nitty gritty.
You're maybe selling yourself poorly or in the wrong places if this is what you see. Maybe your "nitty gritty" doesn't actually solve the customers problem or, if they're solving the wrong problem you're not effective at showing them what they should solve instead and why should they hire you for it.
Norvig's point about acquired wisdom over time is great and your quips sound like a you problem.
> Then you're doing something very wrong.
I apply to job just like before.
>Maybe your "nitty gritty" doesn't actually solve the customers problem or,
Yes, exactly, which is why I mentioned written a dog pic sharing app in Next.js is superior to reading Knuth. The implied meritocracy doesn't exist in tech. It's filled with biased monochromatic idiots who basically have ideas like 'bad experience is worse than no experience' which is euphemism for we don't hire people older than 26.
>Norvig's point about acquired wisdom over time is great and your quips sound like a you problem.
Only in tech does experience confer a disadvantage. Even in professional sports at 40 Lebron James is still playing. In tech, at 40 you are a dinasour and your career is done and dusted for.
I have yet to see a career path more pretentious, more focused on never ending peacocking and mimicry, ageism, language-ism, unstable and filled with unoriginality of a perverse kind. Go on X to see thousands of tech people having exactly the same personality with anime pfps who magically think the same and are in never ending Nirvana because of LLMs.
I just realized you had just 2 years of experience and are disappointed that you seemingly had more opportunities at 22 without a degree that at 26+ with one. Your self portrayal made me think of someone with ample experience.
I see how, if you're not a certain age with a certain amount of experience, you may find people being unnecessarily dismissive.
I understand the frustration but would say that you need to change that attitude because it's not just unhelpful but you're also wrong.
If you do have passion about software you can make a good living out of it but need to sell yourself and know how to show value to customers. Age won't really matter if you are able to tell a good story. Getting the first jobs is the toughest part. Then you start understanding how.
Lose social media if it gets you down. It's not an indicator of anything. Go to therapy. Find stuff where you have passion and pursue that.
Nothing is guaranteed. I'm sorry you feel lied to or something but there's absolutely an amazing time to be had if you pursue and do what you love.
And yes, Norvig's advice on this post is great.
Ah yes, but of course Norvig never had access to current generation LLMs, which do let you learn C++ in 24 hours! No need to understand the memory hierarchy, the LLM will produce perfectly performant code right out of the box.
With LLMs you can iterate through a hundred thousand software development lifecycles in a month, vastly increasing your rate of project experience gain.
This article is so obsolete, it's literally from the previous century.
You don’t learn C++ in 24 hours. An LLM merely allows you to produce code at a higher complexity much sooner. This is a death sentence for a novice’s understanding.
I do believe he is teaching courses about LLMs and associated technolgies. He is the author of two major texts on AI.
Yes, the LLM can produce code at a high rate, but you aren't going to learn at the same rate that it will produce code.
LLMs are tools that can accelerate learning, but they don't replace the deep understanding and pattern recognition that comes from years of solving real problems and making mistakes.
Heh, no wonder you are getting downvoted. Did you actually learn anything this way? This post is about learning and not how fast you can generate code, generating with LLM's is not learning. Then when you have not learnt anything but you generate LLM code that looks great but you cannot debug it because you never learnt programming and have to rely on the LLM, you have problems. Much like the CEO who vibe coded on replit and lost his production DB.
My point is that most of that learning is not necessary! Does a JavaScript bootcamp developer know what the fuck a memory hierarchy is? malloc? No! Do they need to? Also no! This ignorance stops absolutely nobody from identifying as a Senior Staff Architect with 16 weeks of experience, closing Jiras at 10x the velocity as these fools with crippling debt and a computer science degree.