Last week, Walter Bender wrote: > [...] Perhaps the succinct way I can express my doubts is to assert that > no one has ever learned to program from reading a book (or attending > a MOOC). You can only learn to program by programming.
To which I made this private comment, thinking it would be offtopic here: > I claim to have learned programming from a book in that I taught myself > BASIC and 8080 assembly language from a few magazines that I bought in > 1978/1979 and wrote a bunch of programs on paper. I first had access to > a computer with BASIC in 1980 and a terminal into which I could type > 8080 machine language in hex in 1981. Same thing for C, LISP and > Smalltalk - I had to create my own compilers/interpreters to run the > programs I had previously written on paper. > > To be fair, I got a "computer" from Radio Shack in 1975 (when I was 13 > years old) that could be "programmed" with wires like in a protoboard. > It had 10 switches and 10 lamps and was actually a neat idea for a an > educational toy. And in 1976 I got a programmable calculator from Texas > Instruments that could have 30 very primitive steps. So if someone would > prefer to consider that I first learned to program by programming before > I learned it from a book, I would have to respect that opinion. > > The reason I wrote this is that my experience is probably rare, but > surely not unique. So if you use this argument you might find someone in > the audience contradicting you, which would be a pity since your > complaint about the "hole in the wall" thing is perfectly valid. But Walter Bender replied: > You make a very good point. Your situation is far from unique and echos the > experience of some of the best hackers I know. But even in your description > of your experience, I think the book was serving more as a reference > and that your learning was from doing. That said, I kick around the number 7% > -- 7% will be successful regardless. They are sufficiently self-motivated > that they will seize any opportunity. You are one of the 7%. > > Please share your observations with the iaep and devel lists. Would be > good to expand the discussion. When I started working on a children's computer back in 1983 it was the first time I gave my experience with schools any thought and it became obvious that I had not been a typical student. That meant that I couldn't design for myself, but instead had to understand what education was like for other people. Alan Kay once wrote that when you teach a group of children something none of them have experienced before, about 10% of them learn so easily that it is hard to believe they weren't already experts. Another 10% never quite get it no matter what you do. He said that education is about the remaining 80%. -- Jecel _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
