Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

So I reflect the original question back: How do you demarcate the realm of "programming" such that 750MM excel programmers are on one side of the line, and all the fizz-buzz-segfault l33t hackers are on the other?

More importantly, what does the salary distribution of Excel-wielding VPs vs. Emacs coding grunts say about the actual economic value of these different partitions of coders?

“Most programmers are terrible at teaching real people to program... Basic programming should be taught at the whiteboard, not the screen.” Wut I don’t think *anything* should be taught at the whiteboard if it can be avoided & it seems borderline insane to do that with code

I don't think it can be avoided. I learned to code by starting with simple runtimes (LOGO, BASIC). But once you get beyond that to procedural abstraction, collections of refs, loop variables, etc. - then you need to get a whiteboard and really walk folks thru the runtime model.

I didn't empathize with the lack of ability to model arbitrary systems until I tried explain for-loop (in Python) to somebody in a car. They *could not* understand how or why the loop var changed values.

I have sheets & sheets of paper from when I was 12 or 13, and I was designing my Star Trek BBS game, with full ANSI graphics and a random universe generator. There are functions I wrote out, traced through the execution, thought about corner cases, etc.

I don't disagree that you have to actually write code in order to learn to program. But the idea that you spend most of your time in front of the screen, throwing code at a compiler until your narrow unit tests pass, is part of what's wrong with the industry.

Really learning how to code is not easy nor formulaic for every type of learner. But I maintain that it is primarily a *reasoning* skill, not a procedural one tied to memorizing keywords & APIs & git commands. Like learning a musical or artistic instrument: technique vs. skill.