William Billingsley wrote: > Consider for a moment if we could identify the cognitive requirements of > a profession, the cognitive abilities of candidates, and could simply > cross-check between them to see if candidate X could achieve proficiency > in profession Y.
I refer you my forthcoming analysis of the historical document "Futurama -- episode one", with specific reference to my hypothesis that suicide booths were an inevitable reaction to career chips. The work will also highlight how, even with the wide availability of direct brain interfaces and caffeinated bacon, just anyone still can't learn to program by the year 3000. Note that by 'forthcoming', I mean 'in my dreams', and by 'anyone', I mean *anyone*, from lawyer to lorry driver, from burger flipper to politician, from housewife to astronaut to housewife-stalking astronaut, from homeopath to psychopath to super-intelligent garden path, Pat Robertson, Steve Jobs, Richard Dawkins, Edward Norton, Paris Hilton, Tony Blair, George W Bush, maybe even Tom Cruise, but probably not that guy who dropped out of media studies because it was "too technical". I just wanted to clarify that other less flippant contributors to this thread were also using 'everyone' and 'anyone' in such an all-encompassing way, rather than using them to mean something closer to 'students with some programming element in their courses who actually turn up to my class'. > [...] most students dropped out because > of the same effects of moving away from home for the first time (not > being forced to work, meeting girl-/boyfriends, availability of drugs, > etc) as for any other subject. Not being forced to work, meeting girlfriends and availability of drugs, eh? Where was this campus all the times that I went University? Charles Knutson wrote: >> I believe there is a taxonomy of four types of people, relative to >> professional software construction: >> 1) Those born to code, who need almost no coaching; >> 2) Those born capable but in need of training in order to be successful; >> 3) Those not really born to it, but who can be trained sufficiently to make >> a living; >> 4) Those whose brains are really not wired to build software at all. As a matter of interest, do you have a sense of how the general population is distributed across these suggested types? Rather than just categories or types, I'd actually propose a spectrum of capabilities, with people who just 'get' computer technology at one end, people who would sooner eat lint that use it to check their C programs at the other, and the substantial mass of people bulging somewhere along the middle. (Of the spectrum.) I'd speculate, completely without anything beyond years of experience and arrogant presumption, that the "just get computer technology" end of the spectrum glows with about 5% of the population, the "couldn't write 'hello, world!' despite years of practice" end is dimmed by maybe 15% of the population, while the remaining 80% of the population huddles around various quantumly-distributed embers in between. I think the end groups are inherent, while the huddles are plastic. I also think that people who couldn't grasp programming in their cute, butter-secreting paws at any point during the lifetime of a non-terminating Sunday generator tend to be missing from our web-enabled world in much the same way as Star Trek fans tend to be missing from WWF wrestling matches; a combination of self-defensive avoidance of what they're bad at, while haphazardly sticking to what they're actually good at. Nick Flor wrote: > For the record, I believe anyone can learn to program at a professional > level. Just to make sure I'm insulting as many people as possible in one message, I would counter that if we really could teach *anyone* (see earlier definition) to program at a professional level, it would be compelling evidence that our standards for "professional programmer" weren't high enough yet. Which might go some way towards explaining this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000781.html -- Frank Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
