10 ms·

All Programmers Are Self-Taught

247 points by jgn 15y ago

j_baker 15y ago
if my program compiled and my unit tests demonstrated correctness, that was enough. ... Your professors taught you unit testing? In terms of learning the "practical" side of programming, I think that right there gives you a leg up on most CS students.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
angelbob 15y ago
Carnegie Mellon is quite a stronghold of this. They don't teach much coding -- they hand you the books, give you projects and grade the results. If you produce workable code, mostly you win :-) It's telling that CMU is considered such a great tech school. Even the best don't know how to teach programming (yet?).
- spauka 15y ago
  On the contrary, I don't really think that it is the University's job to teach "programming". University traditionally focuses around teaching the skills to do research. Higher level skills such as analysis and problem solving. Consider learning history. It is expected that you "know" how to write an essay. You may be critiqued on it, but it is not the primary motivation for your study of that subject. My personal opinion is that university is not a place to learn tools (i.e. programming), but to learn to apply knowledge to form solutions to complex problems. We learn about algorithms, data structures and techniques because that is what we need to know to learn to solve hard problems. Programming, while not separate from this (i.e. you can hardly build anything without knowing how to use a screwdriver) is something that is assumed knowledge. Teaching it at university would waste valuable time in courses that are already too packed to give rigorous treatment of all topics covered.
  - scott_s 15y ago
    The CS undergrad curriculums that I have been a part of (on the student and teaching side) were designed so that people with no prior exposure to CS or programming could succeed. For that reason, the introductory class taught programming. Sure, they (we) tried to instill general CS concepts along the way, but the fundamental task was to teach the students how to think algorithmically, how to use that skill to solve a particular problem, and, yes, how to use the particular tools we chose (that is, the language, compiler, editor or IDE). To do otherwise is to require that incoming students already know how to program. That is, I think, indefensible. If students want to test out of the introductory course, fine. But it must exist, just as the intro to physics course must exist for physics majors.
  - thomaslangston 15y ago
    I'd say you're wrong. I don't think we should assume the students have the knowledge 1) because they obviously don't have the knowledge and 2) it doesn't match the methodology of every other applied science. I don't assume that students are competent to work in a biology lab before college. Why should Computer Science get a free pass from teaching the lab work techniques that all other applied sciences are expected to teach?
- rpearl 15y ago
  It's funny because I was going to bring up a complete counter point to one of the features of the article, in which TAs never read code, using CMU as the school. I'm a TA for our operating systems class (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410/), and We Read Your Code. Every line. We print out thread libraries (~1000 lines of code) and kernels (~4000 lines of code, prints on 70 sheets of paper or more), and then we go over it with a red pen. We think it's some of the best feedback people get at any school. For the kernel, each group gets a one-on-one meeting with one of the TAs (or the professor) to go over the whole kernel. I've graded some really abysmal project 0s, but by the time they get to the bigger projects we've stamped out some of the bad habits, and I'm happy to read code written by those students, because they learn the most and produce good results by the end. The philosophy is that code is for people to read; the next guy to maintain the code in 6 months (or just you 24 hours later with no sleep in between); your reviewers, and so on.
richardburton 15y ago
I have been trying to learn to code for about 3 years. Recently - I succeeded (in getting started!). I had been on courses, bought books, read tutorials etc. but at the end of each forced exercise I still could not build a decent rails app. Then, after coming back from the US 6 months ago, I decided I wanted a GroupMe clone for the UK. So I built one. http://bit.ly/groupmeclone http://bit.ly/groupmeclone The SMS is disabled on that version as I have no intention of subsidising peoples' group-messages but the fact is it WORKS and finally learnt to code. The controller is fat, the model is thin, there are no tests, there are lots of lengthy if-else statements, there are lots of bugs but I do not care because I finally learnt to code. I have built little scripts for managing my kindle (https://gist.github.com/1404068 https://gist.github.com/1404068) and scripts to get my Instragram pics (https://gist.github.com/1399696 https://gist.github.com/1399696) and I love it. I feel like I can finally call myself a rank amateur nuby Hacker. It feels good.
- iamandrus 15y ago
  Congratulations on your first app. It's a good feeling indeed. :) I recently wrote a ton of Node.js example scripts (chat, group chat, notifications, interaction with PHP, etc), because I had never worked with Node before. I knew PHP, a bit of Rails, and C, but it really feels good to learn a new language or way of programming. I didn't need books or anything, just a bit of example code. Obviously, since I knew JS, Node wasn't too difficult, but it's an extension of what I previously knew so it took a while to get used to. I also learned a lot more about JS in the process. Self-teaching yourself to code has amazing results.
  - richardburton 15y ago
    Thanks a lot! Node looks really clever. Right now I am learning C as I am really interested in computer vision. It is a massive leap above my current skill-set but you have to start somewhere.
- doktrin 15y ago
  That's quite inspiring. I would like to be where you are at, skill wise, in a few months time. Overcoming the inertia (and finding time after 12 hour work days), is proving quite the challenge. How many hours did you spend per day, roughly, and how many all told?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
chrismealy 15y ago
I agree with the premise. However, the whole world runs on sloppy, inelegant, and downright ugly code. I strive to write pretty code but the truth is it doesn't matter that much. Just getting it done and out the door counts for so much more.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  Just getting it done and out the door counts for so much more right now. It matters far less in a day, week, month or year when you or the next guy has to maintain it. Though now that I reflect for a second I have to acknowledge that it's all that matters to the stakeholders, and not necessarily to the coders (nor future maintainers).
rileya 15y ago
Very true. As a current CS student, I couldn't agree more. From what I've seen thus far, most school assignments are pretty easy to stumble through without really understanding what you're doing. As much useful stuff as I've learned in class, it's been personal projects that have really solidified things and taught me the most valuable lessons.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- jraines 15y ago
  Who says there was a conversion? It's possible to grow up as both. I know a few CS guys who were national level swimmers, and one who was international caliber and only went CS after completing a masters in EE.
wvenable 15y ago
I mostly had the same experience as the author in university, with the sole exception of the C++ class. That class was brutal -- you had the match the style guide exactly, have good variable names, good comments, const-correctness, etc. When I've taught programming to beginners, I try and demonstrate good code and when I see ugly code I point them in a better direction. I have, however, had students be stubbornly focused on the output of their code and ignore all my advice. No matter how ugly and hard to debug their code was, they refused to believe it mattered.
namidark 15y ago
I disagree, I often see people in the CS program who haven't done a lick of programming outside assignments and don't bother teaching themselves anything beyond whats required for class.
- BadassFractal 15y ago
  Regardless, they tend not to go anywhere meaningful professionally. I wouldn't be surprised if 10-15 years down the line, these mediocre corporate programmers (they can only survive in a large organization, where you don't have to pull your weight nearly as much as on a 10 person team) they become managers from hell.
demian 15y ago
There is a difference between "self-taught" and "polishing skills with experience". Whatever you study in school, you will never be 100% prepeared to work. That being said, code/program design IS a very important skill that seems to be hard to teach in school.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
The thing about coding is that you have to be self taught. Languages, techniques, and technology in general moves so fast that by the time you get a degree everything you've learned as far as coding goes is already being replaced. I learned simple HTML when I was 11 and have been self teaching myself ever since. I'm not in my second year of a degree in CS and what I've found is that the language and the code itself is not important. What's important are the concepts. Types, objects, methods, the theories behind programming, and all of those less tangible things are what's important because that is the basic foundation of programming. Programming is different than other skills. It's as much of an art as it is a science. The science is relatively unchanging but the art does. Your code is always evolving and there's always the potential for you to make yourself obsolete if you don't continue to teach yourself. I focus on the web and in working in web design in particular I'm seeing a trend that speaks to the idea that you must always be teaching yourself. There are oodles and oodles of web design/development firms out there that have been around since the late 90's that you can tell have been around since the late 90's. Their work looks dated in terms of design and their techniques look like they're right out of 1997! The guys working there used to be young and up on the latest trends but it's obvious they've stopped learning and young guys are passing them up easily. Even people with less than half their experience are writing better code and have prettier output. I think you can tell who got into programming just to get a job and who got into it out of passion by looking at their work. If it continually improves they've got passion, if it plateaus at a certain point then they're just employed and nothing more. In the end being self taught is a requirement and never an option in this field. Once you have the foundational knowledge of programming then everything else is just a matter of keeping up with new tech and learning some new syntax every so often.
- sounds 15y ago
  Counterexample? I'm self-taught. I'm trying to filter for confirmation bias here. I dated a girl (it was awesome but it didn't last) who was a C.S. grad student but wasn't the type to "autodidact" at anything. She was also a stunning musician, an entrepreneur, and an investor. Ok, basically I'm trying to paint the picture of someone who is clearly my superior in many areas, and understands C.S., but isn't self taught. I couldn't pretend to know all the reasons, but she wasn't in it just for the job or the money. She seemed a genuine hacker but just not in the same sense as me.
apaitch 15y ago
I'm not sure I can fully agree with the idea that programmers are self-taught in the sense of writing good code. I'm a student at the University of Waterloo, and in the courses in 1st and 2nd year a sizeable chunk of the marks depends on readability/documentation and such. We have coding guidelines and we lose marks for not following them. Needless to say, this doesn't mean most students at Waterloo write good, well-documented, readable code. Most of them are focused on getting the program to work, sprinkling in obvious comments (i.e. "//setting width to 60" ) and debugging when the tests fail. When they get marks off for poor documentation/readability they either complain or brush it off, claiming that since their program worked the rest isn't a big deal. Bottom line: in my experience, the reason most programmers are self-taught with regard to writing good code is not that no one tries to teach them. It's that most of them don't think they NEED to know (i.e. don't place enough importance on it) and are willing to lose marks for it until they get to a job and they have no to choice but to, you guessed it, teach themselves. There are people who try to make the best out of their education, and these can be very good coders who learned by making the best of their education. (Note: obviously this is a generalization - there are plenty of students who try to write good code.)
- lukev 15y ago
  No personal reflection, but what "good code" means in a professional context is quite a bit removed from student assignments. There are just some things you'll never learn, for example, until you have to interact daily with code you wrote a year ago.
  - evilduck 15y ago
    Student assignments also rarely operate in the sheer magnitude of real world programs. In university, I think the longest assignment I had was in the ballpark of a couple thousand lines of code and you could pretty readily keep it all your head as you solved the problem, there's not too much abstraction or delegation of responsibilities, no interfacing with 3rd parties, few library dependencies, it's all written in a single language, etc, etc. And you wrote it all from scratch by yourself or in a small team with (likely) equally inexperienced peers, so you know all the clever tricks that were employed. On the job, I deal with company's code base that's over a million lines of code and uses a very messy database, maintained by dozens of people or varying skill levels over the last decade, wrought from an unholy amalgamation of 3 different programming languages spread over several servers and reliant on a half dozen "support utilities" to keep applying band-aids to bugs that "aren't cost effective to fix". Writing good code the interacts with bad code is one of my hardest professional endeavors.
tmcw 15y ago
Actually, according to this article, "All programmer’s are self-taught." Unfortunately, some are also self-taught in grammar and punctuation. (I had to. My snark quota is done for the day.)
- jgn 15y ago
  Sorry about that, fixed now.
scott_s 15y ago
As someone who has taught and TAed many students, I always tried to comment on coding style, explain what good style is, and why. This becomes more difficult as the number of students scales.
langsamer 15y ago
I'm not sure I agree. Yes to a certain degree, I think that programmers are self-taught, but I think like most things in life, most of the learning comes from your peer group. Working on a project in a small team with other motivated developers is a much more enriching learning experience than doing solo class projects or teaching yourself some new technology.
crxpandion 15y ago
I disagree with this post. There are professors out there who do in fact teach code style in a very hands on and personal manner. Chris Riesbeck [1] at Northwestern University has made a great system to teach good coding practices in a number of languages. Many of my fellow alumni have learned good coding practices from him. Its an inside joke to talk about "Riesbeck crying" when messy code is written. [1] http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~riesbeck/critiquing.html http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~riesbeck/critiquing.html
th 15y ago
I think CS departments should offer at least one course that spends a little time focusing on writing quality code. The Software Engineering course I took at university was a pretty good introduction to "programming". One of our required texts for the course was Code Complete by Steve McConnell. We were required to read all the chapters that focused on programming style.
makecheck 15y ago
Programming is unusually accessible compared to other skills. If I wanted to learn how to raise farm animals, where would I start? A person needs only a few common things to try programming: an off-the-shelf computer, maybe a book, and these days an Internet connection. After that, they require only the traits common to any other hobby, such as free time and enough imagination to figure out what is going to be built. (I'm glazing over a few details of course, such as the fact that knowing how to type would certainly speed things up.) Programming is also an unusually marketable hobby skill. With many hobbies you can invest a lot of time and effort and produce beautiful things, but that's liable to only gain you praise; in programming, it can gain you a really good job. This is a pretty smart investment: for a modest expenditure yourself you might net a high income so it should not be surprising if people often teach themselves. Besides, when I hire someone I like seeing evidence of side projects that reveal a certain passion for doing good software work. I wouldn't hire an artist or designer without seeing a portfolio either, and software has a lot of things in common with art and design.
richchan 15y ago
I agree that coding is generally not "taught" in lectures or recitations, but, like the article says, we learn from other people -- other people's code, their comments on our code, etc. In fact, I feel like that may be the only way to learn how to write good code and isn't something that can easily be self-taught. Working with and learning from other people is way more effective (than just writing code) in figuring out how to identify good and bad code. And I think formal CS education usually gives people the right tools (like algos, design patterns, data structures, etc.) to understand and work with others.
JJMalina 15y ago
I agree. As a third year undergrad also I've noticed that the focus on the code itself has diminished to almost zero from CS 101. At least in that course my professor mentioned a few things about code quality and design like DRY, loose-coupling, etc. My data structures professor's sample code which he would give out had single capital letters as variables, single lowercase letter variables, and awful and inconsistent indentation. I understand that it's data structures and not an open source project being maintained by the professor, but there were students in the course who barely had any experience programming outside of school. My guess is that the professor's neglect for any sort of code conventions will carry over with those students. My school does offer a class called "Production Quality Software" but it's a graduate course and if you want to take it as an undergrad you only get 3 credits. IMO the situation is not good.
blago 15y ago
My school experience was almost the same with one awkward and notable exception: writing a cache emulator implementing 3 different strategies for an Operating Systems class. I still hurt when I remember the TA took points for... indirection. Apparently an abstract C++ class with 3 subclasses was a no-no in the OS world.
bgray 15y ago
I find myself very good at picking up small examples of code. I think the real challenge in programming isn't learning how if statements, loops, arrays, etc. work but how to put them together to do what you want. This is the real challenge and I believe this is a combination of self-teaching (maybe experiences) and natural ability.
- glimcat 15y ago
  Loops are to software development as spelling is to writing a novel.
hammerdr 15y ago
College is an interesting beast. It is a great tool to mature bright teenagers into contributing adults for society. It does this in several ways: throws you into a small space full of diverse people, challenges you mentally to an almost breaking point and forges you into the mold of a person you will be for the rest of your life. Oh, and you'll learn some professional skills, as well. For high tech industries, this is even more pronounced. I apply very little of what I learned in college to my everyday activities (though I do love a good compilers or garbage collection nerd-out). This is okay with me: I know that without college I wouldn't be who I am today and probably not as prepared to make my mark on the world. The more cynic of us will say that CS programs teach for one thing: post-graduate courses. This is, to a degree, true. However, the VIM trick that I picked up at work today is NOT the sort of thing I would have been happy with a professor 'challenging' me on during my courses. How you become a good programmer is through: experience, lots of boring little things that add up and working with good programmers (which almost categorically disqualifies professors and fellow students). Want to learn to program? Work up! Always be the worst person on the team. Find people better than you and listen. Edit: Also, good programmers: part of your job is to make people around you better. Don't shoo away the wide-eyed and eager of us (me).
- herge 15y ago
  > However, the VIM trick that I picked up at work today is NOT the sort of thing I would have been happy with a professor 'challenging' me on during my courses. University teaches you the things that you cannot learn on your own.
  - bguthrie 15y ago
    University may expose you to concepts that you might never have encountered on your own. But there's nothing that you can't learn on your own, and in fact the history of learning is full of the contributions of self-educated savants.
    - qw 15y ago
      The problem with self-education is that it's too easy to ignore those subjects because they don't seem interesting or relevant. Someone who is interested in web programming may not see the need for learning assembler, but most of those who learned it would probably say that it was not a useless experience.
bguthrie 15y ago
I sympathize with the author's experience, but all programmers are absolutely not self-taught. There are all sorts of ways to learn programming that don't involve homework assignments or even college classes; pair programming and mentorship with a skilled craftsperson comes to mind as one perfectly nice alternative. Besides, even after college I learned a tremendous amount about programming from my colleagues and peers over the years; programming isn't one of those things you learn, and then you're done learning it. It sounds like in this case, college didn't adequately cover the basics, and the author decided (to their credit!) to drive their own learning; but I promise there's a great big crowd of helpful peers and teachers out there when you're ready for them.
tdavis 15y ago
There are two classes of programmers: the taught and the self-propelled. You can certainly teach someone to program--what they do after that defines the rest of their career. No CS curriculum will give all the information one needs to be a great programmer, but it's certainly possible to have a long and mediocre career as a taught programmer. I would wager a majority of the best programmers are also self-taught, though. Not because College is a bad experience or sets you up for failure, but because it's really internal motivation and curiosity that makes a programmer grow, not something they learned in a CS course once upon a time. And you've got to be pretty damn curious to make a career of programming without any formal introduction or education.
- ntkachov 15y ago
  I would argue that a good CS curriculum makes you a good Computer Scientist. I started really programming my senior year of high school. My code has been steadily improving since then. However if it was not for my CS courses I would't be able to tell the difference between a binary tree and a stack. Programmers are artists. You can't teach art. Computer scientists are mathematics. Math must be learned. The two together are Engineers.
  - mpercy 15y ago
    I like this.
  - digitailor 15y ago
    I'm a self-taught programmer who went to art school and I love this thought-provoking comment. There's one thing I'd like to point out. You can teach the techniques of art, which are used for creating art. You can teach the techniques of programming, which are used for creating software. You can't teach how to create something that's never been created before. That goes for creating ground-breaking art, as well as ground-breaking software. Often, it's a set of disparate and interdisciplinary techniques, seemingly unrelated, that are used together to create the cutting-edge.
    - narag 15y ago
ww520 15y ago
That's not true. It depends on the type of classes and the professors. Some professors and TA would go to great length to show how programming are done, especially the intro classes. Of course there's always some amount of self-learning, as in any discipline you can't be spoonfed for all materials without doing it yourself. You go further with self motivation and self-learning since there're only so many class hours, and there're a lot more topics in programming.
geebee 15y ago
Interesting... I had a professor who spent a ton of time looking at my code. I almost didn't like asking him a question, because before he'd answer it, he'd insist on reviewing at my code and making me refactor it, and it was always at least a half hour, often well over an hour, before we'd actually get to my question. It was good for me, though, and I knew it - I did ask him to be my senior thesis advisor. Interestingly, this guy was a math professor, not a CS professor. But he was very particular about code.
vph 15y ago
Programming needs lots of training, for which self motivation, self teaching is important. But to say that all programmers are self-taught is a little short sighted. Beyond the basic syntax, there are difficult concepts and idioms in many languages or programming paradigms that can be quite hard for a person (who is not familiar with such concepts, idioms, paradigms) to discover by him/herself. These things include pointers in C, reasoning about correctness of programs, recursive techniques (dynamic programming, etc.), and many functional programming concepts. Good teachers can make these things a lot easier to learn.
devuatl 15y ago
Programming is a trade of great skill and requires enormous amounts of knowledge. Whereas one has to be self-taught it doesn't mean one is alone. It is something I found out when I got my first job. I joined a small team at a startup. Those guys did their best to make me produce quality code as soon as possible. They were reviewing my code several times a day, and teaching me what to do to, to make it efficent, easy to understand and well designed. Early on they even made me read the "Clean code" and I am eternally grateful for this. Now I think part of being self-taught is actually having to find teachers on your own. Software Engineering is always about knowledge - whenever you code, you're probably solving a problem, which hasn't been solved before. Otherwise you'd just use some library to do the trick. It means that programming is about inventing new stuff, and so when you tell someone about your code, you're actually teaching them about it. Whenever you join a new project, someone has to teach you how to work with their system. If you're independent contractor building software for your client, you have to learn their ways of doing business. High tech jobs are all about knowledge transfer, this way or another. During my college I didn't learn that much from my professors, when it comes to software engineering in the trenches. I did learn a lot during college though. It was a time of meeting other people who were passionate for technology. We could exchange our insights, and do college projects our way. We would give each other feedback on our work, and so we were actually teaching each other. I think above applies to meetup groups, code retreats and similiar initiatives. Programmers gather together to learn. Software engineering is all about knowledge transfer, and you have to want to learn, but it doesn't mean there's nobody to teach you. You just have to find your teachers on your own. You are self-taught, but never alone!
- babebridou 15y ago
  This is my feeling, too. I never took any serious CS course during my studies, not more than maybe an hour a week at best on Mathlab, Caml, Prolog or Pascal, a tiny bit of assembler or LOGO, and these courses were almost always tied to other scientific disciplines, using the computer as a tool in the exact same way as we would use a ruler, an erlenmeyer or a LED. I learned programming at work. I was working in a startup that I joined shortly after the internet bubble burst, in 2002, as their first employee. I was taught, beyond syntax and flow, to find my own "Way of the Programming Fist", as I like to name it, and more importantly to keep an open mind for other ways of programming. The key, and possibly the only lesson that is still relevant today: "When in doubt, remember that your Way of Programming is complete, which means you can eventually build anything with it, anything. Whether you want to display a barchart from a static printer spool log or light up a bulb with a handclap, your Way of Programming can eventually do it. For every goal, there are probably faster, stronger or easier Ways, but these are never 100% better: there's always a tradeoff. For that reason you don't need to learn the other Ways - but make sure you acknowledge their existence, learn and remember these pros & cons your whole life." You're talking about "Quality Code" - I didn't get it through people looking at my code, but through me looking at other people's code. My brains designed some abstract "compiler" of sorts, used in my very mind to parse an alien piece of source. For me, "Quality" in that domain is the amount of work I need to do to be understand the "Way of the Programming Fist" of the coder, and use it in turn for my own programs. It has a lot to do with conventions, design patterns, formatting, naming and of course the programming language's "family", whether it's procedural, functional, object-oriented or whatever. A decade later, it feels like it's still only the beginning, but I'm now proficient enough to understand the pros and the cons of some of the various conventions, design patterns, algorithms or programming languages I've met along the way, the way they fit with various goals and requirements, I'm mature enough to make my own choices, and I actually have my own programming business. I would absolutely describe myself as a self-taught programmer, but like the above poster said, I would have gone absolutely nowhere on my own. Programming is all about knowledge transfer - "Here's what I use to do this, and here are the benefits, here are the tradeoffs" should be every programmer's favourite sentence.
prodikl 15y ago
I took CS101 twice because I hated it. When i found my passion in web, that's all I needed. I learned AS3 and LAMP in a relatively short time; it was just a matter of motivation!
jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
Just because most (not all) programmers are self-taught, doesn't mean that's the natural or optimal state of being. This is mostly a criticism of academic CS (which aims to produce systems programmers and researchers). The underlying implication that programming is somehow unteachable is bogus.
EmilStenstrom 15y ago
Is this really so different from other disciplines? I find that courses and theory are good for grasping the basic concepts, not for actually learning how to use those concepts in the real world. I'm guessing that holds for most other disciplines too. I read a course about data structures. It was taught in Java, but it was very clear that Java was not the point. What did I learn by that? Not to write linked lists in Java - I've never had to do that again - but to understand the basics of how to think about storing data in your programs. For me, courses are great for grasping theory.
suprememoocow 15y ago
Interesting article. I tend to agree with the author. In fact, I would go further and claim that while I've met many very good programmers who learnt they're craft at university or college, it's probably safe to say that all the truly great programmers I've met have done at least 10,000hrs of self-taught programming before they even left school.
henrikschroder 15y ago
The first thing our teacher said in my introductory course in CS was that the only difference between a good programmer and a bad programmer is the amount of code they've seen. And from that follows that the only way to become a good programmer is to look at a lot of other people's code.
fab13n 15y ago
Having spent some time in the academia, the main reason why most TAs and professors don't teach you how to code is that most of them don't know how to code for themselves. That skill is neither expected nor rewarded in academic careers. So unless they moonlighted as hackers or in a company, they never learned to code as students, and certainly won't as staff. They certainly won't teach it.
- araneae 15y ago
  It depends on what branch of CS you're in. Just like computer science is not about computers, it's also not really about programming. Certainly there's overlap. I have a pH.D. student friend who works on proving the correctness of programs. He doesn't write code, he writes proofs. Of course he'd be more rusty in C than a full time C dev. But I also have pH.D. students that build proof-of-concept software. Yeah, they're not optimized in the way that live software is optimized, but they can certainly code. And I really have to wonder where you went to school if "most" of the TAs and profs "can't code" and what kind of standard you have. That was not my experience at all when I went to school.
  - fab13n 15y ago
    Sure there are some researchers who can and do code, but their coding skills rarely do much good to their career. I bet that's why you delegate PoC software development to PhD grunts :) Moreover, it seems to me that most academic coders don't have enough occasions to collaborate on long-lived code bases; I don't think you can call yourself a developer if you can't deal with code decay and team collaboration. Finally, I didn't realize how many teachers and TAs couldn't code while I was a student--although I had serious doubt about some of them; I fully realized it when I was a PhD and TA, with a background as a start-up developer. I don't see it as a huge issue, though: as the article points out, many developers successfully learn to develop on the go. In my opinion, school is there to teach you the foundations which would be very hard to learn on the fly as a junior developer: maths, formal reasoning, hardware architecture, algorithms, maybe a bit of formal semantics. As I recall, those happened to be the most interesting lectures, given by the most awesome professors; it's probably no coincidence.
- 15y ago
bijolianabhi 15y ago
Completely true. The Professor can not make you to code.
tvorryn 15y ago
This essay seems quite relevant: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm It compares self-taught and college taught programmers to street fighters and martial artists.
MBlume 15y ago
Wow. I've been referring to myself as self-taught because, well, I came from a physics background, taught myself Python using google, and started kibitzing on a friend's startup. But it occurs to me reading this, that I probably had more direct instruction than most CS students. We worked together for only a few months, but it was the two of us in a room every day, I showed him my code, talked through what I was trying to make work, he'd nudge me towards best practices, and I got better. I should thank that dude.

247 points by jgn 15y ago

if my program compiled and my unit tests demonstrated correctness, that was enough. ... Your professors taught you unit testing? In terms of learning the "practical" side of programming, I think that right there gives you a leg up on most CS students.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

angelbob 15y ago

Carnegie Mellon is quite a stronghold of this. They don't teach much coding -- they hand you the books, give you projects and grade the results. If you produce workable code, mostly you win :-) It's telling that CMU is considered such a great tech school. Even the best don't know how to teach programming (yet?).

spauka 15y ago
On the contrary, I don't really think that it is the University's job to teach "programming". University traditionally focuses around teaching the skills to do research. Higher level skills such as analysis and problem solving. Consider learning history. It is expected that you "know" how to write an essay. You may be critiqued on it, but it is not the primary motivation for your study of that subject. My personal opinion is that university is not a place to learn tools (i.e. programming), but to learn to apply knowledge to form solutions to complex problems. We learn about algorithms, data structures and techniques because that is what we need to know to learn to solve hard problems. Programming, while not separate from this (i.e. you can hardly build anything without knowing how to use a screwdriver) is something that is assumed knowledge. Teaching it at university would waste valuable time in courses that are already too packed to give rigorous treatment of all topics covered.
- scott_s 15y ago
  The CS undergrad curriculums that I have been a part of (on the student and teaching side) were designed so that people with no prior exposure to CS or programming could succeed. For that reason, the introductory class taught programming. Sure, they (we) tried to instill general CS concepts along the way, but the fundamental task was to teach the students how to think algorithmically, how to use that skill to solve a particular problem, and, yes, how to use the particular tools we chose (that is, the language, compiler, editor or IDE). To do otherwise is to require that incoming students already know how to program. That is, I think, indefensible. If students want to test out of the introductory course, fine. But it must exist, just as the intro to physics course must exist for physics majors.
- thomaslangston 15y ago
  I'd say you're wrong. I don't think we should assume the students have the knowledge 1) because they obviously don't have the knowledge and 2) it doesn't match the methodology of every other applied science. I don't assume that students are competent to work in a biology lab before college. Why should Computer Science get a free pass from teaching the lab work techniques that all other applied sciences are expected to teach?
rpearl 15y ago
It's funny because I was going to bring up a complete counter point to one of the features of the article, in which TAs never read code, using CMU as the school. I'm a TA for our operating systems class (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410/), and We Read Your Code. Every line. We print out thread libraries (~1000 lines of code) and kernels (~4000 lines of code, prints on 70 sheets of paper or more), and then we go over it with a red pen. We think it's some of the best feedback people get at any school. For the kernel, each group gets a one-on-one meeting with one of the TAs (or the professor) to go over the whole kernel. I've graded some really abysmal project 0s, but by the time they get to the bigger projects we've stamped out some of the bad habits, and I'm happy to read code written by those students, because they learn the most and produce good results by the end. The philosophy is that code is for people to read; the next guy to maintain the code in 6 months (or just you 24 hours later with no sleep in between); your reviewers, and so on.

richardburton 15y ago

I have been trying to learn to code for about 3 years. Recently - I succeeded (in getting started!). I had been on courses, bought books, read tutorials etc. but at the end of each forced exercise I still could not build a decent rails app. Then, after coming back from the US 6 months ago, I decided I wanted a GroupMe clone for the UK. So I built one. http://bit.ly/groupmeclone http://bit.ly/groupmeclone The SMS is disabled on that version as I have no intention of subsidising peoples' group-messages but the fact is it WORKS and finally learnt to code. The controller is fat, the model is thin, there are no tests, there are lots of lengthy if-else statements, there are lots of bugs but I do not care because I finally learnt to code. I have built little scripts for managing my kindle (https://gist.github.com/1404068 https://gist.github.com/1404068) and scripts to get my Instragram pics (https://gist.github.com/1399696 https://gist.github.com/1399696) and I love it. I feel like I can finally call myself a rank amateur nuby Hacker. It feels good.

iamandrus 15y ago
Congratulations on your first app. It's a good feeling indeed. :) I recently wrote a ton of Node.js example scripts (chat, group chat, notifications, interaction with PHP, etc), because I had never worked with Node before. I knew PHP, a bit of Rails, and C, but it really feels good to learn a new language or way of programming. I didn't need books or anything, just a bit of example code. Obviously, since I knew JS, Node wasn't too difficult, but it's an extension of what I previously knew so it took a while to get used to. I also learned a lot more about JS in the process. Self-teaching yourself to code has amazing results.
- richardburton 15y ago
  Thanks a lot! Node looks really clever. Right now I am learning C as I am really interested in computer vision. It is a massive leap above my current skill-set but you have to start somewhere.
doktrin 15y ago
That's quite inspiring. I would like to be where you are at, skill wise, in a few months time. Overcoming the inertia (and finding time after 12 hour work days), is proving quite the challenge. How many hours did you spend per day, roughly, and how many all told?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

chrismealy 15y ago

I agree with the premise. However, the whole world runs on sloppy, inelegant, and downright ugly code. I strive to write pretty code but the truth is it doesn't matter that much. Just getting it done and out the door counts for so much more.

mattdeboard 15y ago
Just getting it done and out the door counts for so much more right now. It matters far less in a day, week, month or year when you or the next guy has to maintain it. Though now that I reflect for a second I have to acknowledge that it's all that matters to the stakeholders, and not necessarily to the coders (nor future maintainers).

rileya 15y ago

Very true. As a current CS student, I couldn't agree more. From what I've seen thus far, most school assignments are pretty easy to stumble through without really understanding what you're doing. As much useful stuff as I've learned in class, it's been personal projects that have really solidified things and taught me the most valuable lessons.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jraines 15y ago
Who says there was a conversion? It's possible to grow up as both. I know a few CS guys who were national level swimmers, and one who was international caliber and only went CS after completing a masters in EE.

wvenable 15y ago

I mostly had the same experience as the author in university, with the sole exception of the C++ class. That class was brutal -- you had the match the style guide exactly, have good variable names, good comments, const-correctness, etc. When I've taught programming to beginners, I try and demonstrate good code and when I see ugly code I point them in a better direction. I have, however, had students be stubbornly focused on the output of their code and ignore all my advice. No matter how ugly and hard to debug their code was, they refused to believe it mattered.

namidark 15y ago

I disagree, I often see people in the CS program who haven't done a lick of programming outside assignments and don't bother teaching themselves anything beyond whats required for class.

BadassFractal 15y ago
Regardless, they tend not to go anywhere meaningful professionally. I wouldn't be surprised if 10-15 years down the line, these mediocre corporate programmers (they can only survive in a large organization, where you don't have to pull your weight nearly as much as on a 10 person team) they become managers from hell.

demian 15y ago

There is a difference between "self-taught" and "polishing skills with experience". Whatever you study in school, you will never be 100% prepeared to work. That being said, code/program design IS a very important skill that seems to be hard to teach in school.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

The thing about coding is that you have to be self taught. Languages, techniques, and technology in general moves so fast that by the time you get a degree everything you've learned as far as coding goes is already being replaced. I learned simple HTML when I was 11 and have been self teaching myself ever since. I'm not in my second year of a degree in CS and what I've found is that the language and the code itself is not important. What's important are the concepts. Types, objects, methods, the theories behind programming, and all of those less tangible things are what's important because that is the basic foundation of programming. Programming is different than other skills. It's as much of an art as it is a science. The science is relatively unchanging but the art does. Your code is always evolving and there's always the potential for you to make yourself obsolete if you don't continue to teach yourself. I focus on the web and in working in web design in particular I'm seeing a trend that speaks to the idea that you must always be teaching yourself. There are oodles and oodles of web design/development firms out there that have been around since the late 90's that you can tell have been around since the late 90's. Their work looks dated in terms of design and their techniques look like they're right out of 1997! The guys working there used to be young and up on the latest trends but it's obvious they've stopped learning and young guys are passing them up easily. Even people with less than half their experience are writing better code and have prettier output. I think you can tell who got into programming just to get a job and who got into it out of passion by looking at their work. If it continually improves they've got passion, if it plateaus at a certain point then they're just employed and nothing more. In the end being self taught is a requirement and never an option in this field. Once you have the foundational knowledge of programming then everything else is just a matter of keeping up with new tech and learning some new syntax every so often.

sounds 15y ago
Counterexample? I'm self-taught. I'm trying to filter for confirmation bias here. I dated a girl (it was awesome but it didn't last) who was a C.S. grad student but wasn't the type to "autodidact" at anything. She was also a stunning musician, an entrepreneur, and an investor. Ok, basically I'm trying to paint the picture of someone who is clearly my superior in many areas, and understands C.S., but isn't self taught. I couldn't pretend to know all the reasons, but she wasn't in it just for the job or the money. She seemed a genuine hacker but just not in the same sense as me.

apaitch 15y ago

I'm not sure I can fully agree with the idea that programmers are self-taught in the sense of writing good code. I'm a student at the University of Waterloo, and in the courses in 1st and 2nd year a sizeable chunk of the marks depends on readability/documentation and such. We have coding guidelines and we lose marks for not following them. Needless to say, this doesn't mean most students at Waterloo write good, well-documented, readable code. Most of them are focused on getting the program to work, sprinkling in obvious comments (i.e. "//setting width to 60" ) and debugging when the tests fail. When they get marks off for poor documentation/readability they either complain or brush it off, claiming that since their program worked the rest isn't a big deal. Bottom line: in my experience, the reason most programmers are self-taught with regard to writing good code is not that no one tries to teach them. It's that most of them don't think they NEED to know (i.e. don't place enough importance on it) and are willing to lose marks for it until they get to a job and they have no to choice but to, you guessed it, teach themselves. There are people who try to make the best out of their education, and these can be very good coders who learned by making the best of their education. (Note: obviously this is a generalization - there are plenty of students who try to write good code.)

lukev 15y ago
No personal reflection, but what "good code" means in a professional context is quite a bit removed from student assignments. There are just some things you'll never learn, for example, until you have to interact daily with code you wrote a year ago.
- evilduck 15y ago
  Student assignments also rarely operate in the sheer magnitude of real world programs. In university, I think the longest assignment I had was in the ballpark of a couple thousand lines of code and you could pretty readily keep it all your head as you solved the problem, there's not too much abstraction or delegation of responsibilities, no interfacing with 3rd parties, few library dependencies, it's all written in a single language, etc, etc. And you wrote it all from scratch by yourself or in a small team with (likely) equally inexperienced peers, so you know all the clever tricks that were employed. On the job, I deal with company's code base that's over a million lines of code and uses a very messy database, maintained by dozens of people or varying skill levels over the last decade, wrought from an unholy amalgamation of 3 different programming languages spread over several servers and reliant on a half dozen "support utilities" to keep applying band-aids to bugs that "aren't cost effective to fix". Writing good code the interacts with bad code is one of my hardest professional endeavors.

tmcw 15y ago

Actually, according to this article, "All programmer’s are self-taught." Unfortunately, some are also self-taught in grammar and punctuation. (I had to. My snark quota is done for the day.)

jgn 15y ago
Sorry about that, fixed now.

scott_s 15y ago

As someone who has taught and TAed many students, I always tried to comment on coding style, explain what good style is, and why. This becomes more difficult as the number of students scales.

langsamer 15y ago

I'm not sure I agree. Yes to a certain degree, I think that programmers are self-taught, but I think like most things in life, most of the learning comes from your peer group. Working on a project in a small team with other motivated developers is a much more enriching learning experience than doing solo class projects or teaching yourself some new technology.

crxpandion 15y ago

I disagree with this post. There are professors out there who do in fact teach code style in a very hands on and personal manner. Chris Riesbeck [1] at Northwestern University has made a great system to teach good coding practices in a number of languages. Many of my fellow alumni have learned good coding practices from him. Its an inside joke to talk about "Riesbeck crying" when messy code is written. [1] http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~riesbeck/critiquing.html http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~riesbeck/critiquing.html

th 15y ago

I think CS departments should offer at least one course that spends a little time focusing on writing quality code. The Software Engineering course I took at university was a pretty good introduction to "programming". One of our required texts for the course was Code Complete by Steve McConnell. We were required to read all the chapters that focused on programming style.

makecheck 15y ago

Programming is unusually accessible compared to other skills. If I wanted to learn how to raise farm animals, where would I start? A person needs only a few common things to try programming: an off-the-shelf computer, maybe a book, and these days an Internet connection. After that, they require only the traits common to any other hobby, such as free time and enough imagination to figure out what is going to be built. (I'm glazing over a few details of course, such as the fact that knowing how to type would certainly speed things up.) Programming is also an unusually marketable hobby skill. With many hobbies you can invest a lot of time and effort and produce beautiful things, but that's liable to only gain you praise; in programming, it can gain you a really good job. This is a pretty smart investment: for a modest expenditure yourself you might net a high income so it should not be surprising if people often teach themselves. Besides, when I hire someone I like seeing evidence of side projects that reveal a certain passion for doing good software work. I wouldn't hire an artist or designer without seeing a portfolio either, and software has a lot of things in common with art and design.

richchan 15y ago

I agree that coding is generally not "taught" in lectures or recitations, but, like the article says, we learn from other people -- other people's code, their comments on our code, etc. In fact, I feel like that may be the only way to learn how to write good code and isn't something that can easily be self-taught. Working with and learning from other people is way more effective (than just writing code) in figuring out how to identify good and bad code. And I think formal CS education usually gives people the right tools (like algos, design patterns, data structures, etc.) to understand and work with others.

JJMalina 15y ago

I agree. As a third year undergrad also I've noticed that the focus on the code itself has diminished to almost zero from CS 101. At least in that course my professor mentioned a few things about code quality and design like DRY, loose-coupling, etc. My data structures professor's sample code which he would give out had single capital letters as variables, single lowercase letter variables, and awful and inconsistent indentation. I understand that it's data structures and not an open source project being maintained by the professor, but there were students in the course who barely had any experience programming outside of school. My guess is that the professor's neglect for any sort of code conventions will carry over with those students. My school does offer a class called "Production Quality Software" but it's a graduate course and if you want to take it as an undergrad you only get 3 credits. IMO the situation is not good.

blago 15y ago

My school experience was almost the same with one awkward and notable exception: writing a cache emulator implementing 3 different strategies for an Operating Systems class. I still hurt when I remember the TA took points for... indirection. Apparently an abstract C++ class with 3 subclasses was a no-no in the OS world.

bgray 15y ago

I find myself very good at picking up small examples of code. I think the real challenge in programming isn't learning how if statements, loops, arrays, etc. work but how to put them together to do what you want. This is the real challenge and I believe this is a combination of self-teaching (maybe experiences) and natural ability.

glimcat 15y ago
Loops are to software development as spelling is to writing a novel.

hammerdr 15y ago

College is an interesting beast. It is a great tool to mature bright teenagers into contributing adults for society. It does this in several ways: throws you into a small space full of diverse people, challenges you mentally to an almost breaking point and forges you into the mold of a person you will be for the rest of your life. Oh, and you'll learn some professional skills, as well. For high tech industries, this is even more pronounced. I apply very little of what I learned in college to my everyday activities (though I do love a good compilers or garbage collection nerd-out). This is okay with me: I know that without college I wouldn't be who I am today and probably not as prepared to make my mark on the world. The more cynic of us will say that CS programs teach for one thing: post-graduate courses. This is, to a degree, true. However, the VIM trick that I picked up at work today is NOT the sort of thing I would have been happy with a professor 'challenging' me on during my courses. How you become a good programmer is through: experience, lots of boring little things that add up and working with good programmers (which almost categorically disqualifies professors and fellow students). Want to learn to program? Work up! Always be the worst person on the team. Find people better than you and listen. Edit: Also, good programmers: part of your job is to make people around you better. Don't shoo away the wide-eyed and eager of us (me).

herge 15y ago
> However, the VIM trick that I picked up at work today is NOT the sort of thing I would have been happy with a professor 'challenging' me on during my courses. University teaches you the things that you cannot learn on your own.
- bguthrie 15y ago
  University may expose you to concepts that you might never have encountered on your own. But there's nothing that you can't learn on your own, and in fact the history of learning is full of the contributions of self-educated savants.
  - qw 15y ago
    The problem with self-education is that it's too easy to ignore those subjects because they don't seem interesting or relevant. Someone who is interested in web programming may not see the need for learning assembler, but most of those who learned it would probably say that it was not a useless experience.

bguthrie 15y ago

I sympathize with the author's experience, but all programmers are absolutely not self-taught. There are all sorts of ways to learn programming that don't involve homework assignments or even college classes; pair programming and mentorship with a skilled craftsperson comes to mind as one perfectly nice alternative. Besides, even after college I learned a tremendous amount about programming from my colleagues and peers over the years; programming isn't one of those things you learn, and then you're done learning it. It sounds like in this case, college didn't adequately cover the basics, and the author decided (to their credit!) to drive their own learning; but I promise there's a great big crowd of helpful peers and teachers out there when you're ready for them.

tdavis 15y ago

There are two classes of programmers: the taught and the self-propelled. You can certainly teach someone to program--what they do after that defines the rest of their career. No CS curriculum will give all the information one needs to be a great programmer, but it's certainly possible to have a long and mediocre career as a taught programmer. I would wager a majority of the best programmers are also self-taught, though. Not because College is a bad experience or sets you up for failure, but because it's really internal motivation and curiosity that makes a programmer grow, not something they learned in a CS course once upon a time. And you've got to be pretty damn curious to make a career of programming without any formal introduction or education.

ntkachov 15y ago
I would argue that a good CS curriculum makes you a good Computer Scientist. I started really programming my senior year of high school. My code has been steadily improving since then. However if it was not for my CS courses I would't be able to tell the difference between a binary tree and a stack. Programmers are artists. You can't teach art. Computer scientists are mathematics. Math must be learned. The two together are Engineers.
- mpercy 15y ago
  I like this.
- digitailor 15y ago
  I'm a self-taught programmer who went to art school and I love this thought-provoking comment. There's one thing I'd like to point out. You can teach the techniques of art, which are used for creating art. You can teach the techniques of programming, which are used for creating software. You can't teach how to create something that's never been created before. That goes for creating ground-breaking art, as well as ground-breaking software. Often, it's a set of disparate and interdisciplinary techniques, seemingly unrelated, that are used together to create the cutting-edge.
  - narag 15y ago

ww520 15y ago

That's not true. It depends on the type of classes and the professors. Some professors and TA would go to great length to show how programming are done, especially the intro classes. Of course there's always some amount of self-learning, as in any discipline you can't be spoonfed for all materials without doing it yourself. You go further with self motivation and self-learning since there're only so many class hours, and there're a lot more topics in programming.

geebee 15y ago

Interesting... I had a professor who spent a ton of time looking at my code. I almost didn't like asking him a question, because before he'd answer it, he'd insist on reviewing at my code and making me refactor it, and it was always at least a half hour, often well over an hour, before we'd actually get to my question. It was good for me, though, and I knew it - I did ask him to be my senior thesis advisor. Interestingly, this guy was a math professor, not a CS professor. But he was very particular about code.

vph 15y ago

Programming needs lots of training, for which self motivation, self teaching is important. But to say that all programmers are self-taught is a little short sighted. Beyond the basic syntax, there are difficult concepts and idioms in many languages or programming paradigms that can be quite hard for a person (who is not familiar with such concepts, idioms, paradigms) to discover by him/herself. These things include pointers in C, reasoning about correctness of programs, recursive techniques (dynamic programming, etc.), and many functional programming concepts. Good teachers can make these things a lot easier to learn.

devuatl 15y ago

Programming is a trade of great skill and requires enormous amounts of knowledge. Whereas one has to be self-taught it doesn't mean one is alone. It is something I found out when I got my first job. I joined a small team at a startup. Those guys did their best to make me produce quality code as soon as possible. They were reviewing my code several times a day, and teaching me what to do to, to make it efficent, easy to understand and well designed. Early on they even made me read the "Clean code" and I am eternally grateful for this. Now I think part of being self-taught is actually having to find teachers on your own. Software Engineering is always about knowledge - whenever you code, you're probably solving a problem, which hasn't been solved before. Otherwise you'd just use some library to do the trick. It means that programming is about inventing new stuff, and so when you tell someone about your code, you're actually teaching them about it. Whenever you join a new project, someone has to teach you how to work with their system. If you're independent contractor building software for your client, you have to learn their ways of doing business. High tech jobs are all about knowledge transfer, this way or another. During my college I didn't learn that much from my professors, when it comes to software engineering in the trenches. I did learn a lot during college though. It was a time of meeting other people who were passionate for technology. We could exchange our insights, and do college projects our way. We would give each other feedback on our work, and so we were actually teaching each other. I think above applies to meetup groups, code retreats and similiar initiatives. Programmers gather together to learn. Software engineering is all about knowledge transfer, and you have to want to learn, but it doesn't mean there's nobody to teach you. You just have to find your teachers on your own. You are self-taught, but never alone!

babebridou 15y ago
This is my feeling, too. I never took any serious CS course during my studies, not more than maybe an hour a week at best on Mathlab, Caml, Prolog or Pascal, a tiny bit of assembler or LOGO, and these courses were almost always tied to other scientific disciplines, using the computer as a tool in the exact same way as we would use a ruler, an erlenmeyer or a LED. I learned programming at work. I was working in a startup that I joined shortly after the internet bubble burst, in 2002, as their first employee. I was taught, beyond syntax and flow, to find my own "Way of the Programming Fist", as I like to name it, and more importantly to keep an open mind for other ways of programming. The key, and possibly the only lesson that is still relevant today: "When in doubt, remember that your Way of Programming is complete, which means you can eventually build anything with it, anything. Whether you want to display a barchart from a static printer spool log or light up a bulb with a handclap, your Way of Programming can eventually do it. For every goal, there are probably faster, stronger or easier Ways, but these are never 100% better: there's always a tradeoff. For that reason you don't need to learn the other Ways - but make sure you acknowledge their existence, learn and remember these pros & cons your whole life." You're talking about "Quality Code" - I didn't get it through people looking at my code, but through me looking at other people's code. My brains designed some abstract "compiler" of sorts, used in my very mind to parse an alien piece of source. For me, "Quality" in that domain is the amount of work I need to do to be understand the "Way of the Programming Fist" of the coder, and use it in turn for my own programs. It has a lot to do with conventions, design patterns, formatting, naming and of course the programming language's "family", whether it's procedural, functional, object-oriented or whatever. A decade later, it feels like it's still only the beginning, but I'm now proficient enough to understand the pros and the cons of some of the various conventions, design patterns, algorithms or programming languages I've met along the way, the way they fit with various goals and requirements, I'm mature enough to make my own choices, and I actually have my own programming business. I would absolutely describe myself as a self-taught programmer, but like the above poster said, I would have gone absolutely nowhere on my own. Programming is all about knowledge transfer - "Here's what I use to do this, and here are the benefits, here are the tradeoffs" should be every programmer's favourite sentence.

prodikl 15y ago

I took CS101 twice because I hated it. When i found my passion in web, that's all I needed. I learned AS3 and LAMP in a relatively short time; it was just a matter of motivation!

jeffreymcmanus 15y ago

Just because most (not all) programmers are self-taught, doesn't mean that's the natural or optimal state of being. This is mostly a criticism of academic CS (which aims to produce systems programmers and researchers). The underlying implication that programming is somehow unteachable is bogus.

EmilStenstrom 15y ago

Is this really so different from other disciplines? I find that courses and theory are good for grasping the basic concepts, not for actually learning how to use those concepts in the real world. I'm guessing that holds for most other disciplines too. I read a course about data structures. It was taught in Java, but it was very clear that Java was not the point. What did I learn by that? Not to write linked lists in Java - I've never had to do that again - but to understand the basics of how to think about storing data in your programs. For me, courses are great for grasping theory.

suprememoocow 15y ago

Interesting article. I tend to agree with the author. In fact, I would go further and claim that while I've met many very good programmers who learnt they're craft at university or college, it's probably safe to say that all the truly great programmers I've met have done at least 10,000hrs of self-taught programming before they even left school.

henrikschroder 15y ago

The first thing our teacher said in my introductory course in CS was that the only difference between a good programmer and a bad programmer is the amount of code they've seen. And from that follows that the only way to become a good programmer is to look at a lot of other people's code.

fab13n 15y ago

Having spent some time in the academia, the main reason why most TAs and professors don't teach you how to code is that most of them don't know how to code for themselves. That skill is neither expected nor rewarded in academic careers. So unless they moonlighted as hackers or in a company, they never learned to code as students, and certainly won't as staff. They certainly won't teach it.

araneae 15y ago
It depends on what branch of CS you're in. Just like computer science is not about computers, it's also not really about programming. Certainly there's overlap. I have a pH.D. student friend who works on proving the correctness of programs. He doesn't write code, he writes proofs. Of course he'd be more rusty in C than a full time C dev. But I also have pH.D. students that build proof-of-concept software. Yeah, they're not optimized in the way that live software is optimized, but they can certainly code. And I really have to wonder where you went to school if "most" of the TAs and profs "can't code" and what kind of standard you have. That was not my experience at all when I went to school.
- fab13n 15y ago
  Sure there are some researchers who can and do code, but their coding skills rarely do much good to their career. I bet that's why you delegate PoC software development to PhD grunts :) Moreover, it seems to me that most academic coders don't have enough occasions to collaborate on long-lived code bases; I don't think you can call yourself a developer if you can't deal with code decay and team collaboration. Finally, I didn't realize how many teachers and TAs couldn't code while I was a student--although I had serious doubt about some of them; I fully realized it when I was a PhD and TA, with a background as a start-up developer. I don't see it as a huge issue, though: as the article points out, many developers successfully learn to develop on the go. In my opinion, school is there to teach you the foundations which would be very hard to learn on the fly as a junior developer: maths, formal reasoning, hardware architecture, algorithms, maybe a bit of formal semantics. As I recall, those happened to be the most interesting lectures, given by the most awesome professors; it's probably no coincidence.
15y ago

bijolianabhi 15y ago

Completely true. The Professor can not make you to code.

tvorryn 15y ago

This essay seems quite relevant: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm It compares self-taught and college taught programmers to street fighters and martial artists.

MBlume 15y ago

Wow. I've been referring to myself as self-taught because, well, I came from a physics background, taught myself Python using google, and started kibitzing on a friend's startup. But it occurs to me reading this, that I probably had more direct instruction than most CS students. We worked together for only a few months, but it was the two of us in a room every day, I showed him my code, talked through what I was trying to make work, he'd nudge me towards best practices, and I got better. I should thank that dude.