Dana Fried

perl actually can't be read!

This is interesting to me because growing up I did not have a computer at home, but I did have a library with some books about BASIC and I would look at their source code and mentally figure out what was going on. (And yeah, the line numbers helped a lot for that.)

I mentioned this in another reply but I wonder if small open-source projects are the modern equivalent of that kind of resource.

I think there's too little FOSS that's both small and interesting. I try to make musl interesting that way though.

granted it is a long time since I first learned to program, and an even longer time since I learned to write, but I feel like these are not at all comparable things?

Disagree. Or at least, I think for some people it is like language and for other's it's more like learning game mechanics. Our system is, I would contend, largely set up to teach the latter approach. And as in games, even our ability to do that well varies.

We know a lot of people learn by seeing examples, just like some learn only by doing, and others by being instructed. If we only focus on one mode of learning then only those with that as a primary mode (or those with enough self-direction to seek out other examples) will learn.

I would also contend that for reasons which may be intrinsic, environmental, or both, favoring a specific mode of instruction in computing tends to favor certain demographics over others.

I see programming as having two critical parts to it, technical aspects of design and the underlying machine, and communicating with other programmers. The former is fussing with schematics, and the later happens over existing languages (eg English), even in code.

I can guarantee that's not how many programmers - especially newer programmers - think about it.

One thing I've noticed with newer programmers is that a lot of them conflate learning a programming language with learning to program, possibly because the two are often taught at the same time. I don't think programming can be taught by reading, but programming *languages* can.

In fact, I think the real reason we teach new programmers to write code before we teach them to read it because we are trying to teach them to *program* and not the programming language itself. I'm not sure how I'd teach someone who couldn't program JUST a programming language.