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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>How you become a good programmer is through: experience, lots of boring little things that add up and <i>working with good programmers</i> (which almost categorically disqualifies professors and fellow students).<p>Want to learn to program? Work up! Always be the worst person on the team. Find people better than you and <i>listen</i>.<p>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).
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.<p>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.<p>(Note: obviously this is a generalization - there are plenty of students who try to write good code.)
I have been trying to learn to code for about 3 years. Recently - I succeeded (in getting started!).<p>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.<p><a href="http://bit.ly/groupmeclone" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/groupmeclone</a><p>The SMS is disabled on that version as I have no intention of subsidising peoples' group-messages but the fact is it WORKS and <i>finally learnt to code</i>.<p>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>I finally learnt to code</i>.<p>I have built little scripts for managing my kindle (<a href="https://gist.github.com/1404068" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/1404068</a>) and scripts to get my Instragram pics (<a href="https://gist.github.com/1399696" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/1399696</a>) and <i>I love it</i>.<p>I feel like I can finally call myself a rank amateur nuby Hacker. It feels good.
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.<p>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.
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 <i>free time</i> 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.)<p>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.<p>Besides, when I hire someone I <i>like</i> 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.
There are two classes of programmers: the taught and the self-propelled. You can certainly <i>teach</i> 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 <i>great</i> programmer, but it's certainly possible to have a long and mediocre career as a <i>taught</i> programmer.<p>I would wager a majority of the best programmers are <i>also</i> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>High tech jobs are all about knowledge transfer, this way or another.<p>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.<p>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.<p>You are self-taught, but never alone!
<i>if my program compiled and my unit tests demonstrated correctness, that was enough.</i><p>...<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Programming needs lots of training, for which self motivation, self teaching is important.<p>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.
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.<p>Interestingly, this guy was a math professor, not a CS professor. But he was very particular about code.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~riesbeck/critiquing.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~riesbeck/critiquing.html</a>
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.<p>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.<p>IMO the situation is not good.
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.
Very true. As a current CS student, I couldn't agree more.<p>From what I've seen thus far, most school assignments are pretty easy to stumble through without <i>really</i> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>For me, courses are great for grasping theory.
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.<p>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.
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.
I think CS departments should offer at least one course that spends a little time focusing on writing quality code.<p>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.
Just because most (not all) programmers are self-taught, doesn't mean that's the natural or optimal state of being.<p>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.
There is a difference between "self-taught" and "polishing skills with experience".<p>Whatever you study in school, you will never be 100% prepeared to work.<p>That being said, code/program design IS a very important skill that seems to be hard to teach in school.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, according to this article, "All programmer’s are self-taught."<p>Unfortunately, some are also self-taught in grammar and punctuation. (I had to. My snark quota is done for the day.)
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.
The first thing our teacher said in my introductory course in CS was that the <i>only</i> difference between a good programmer and a bad programmer is the amount of code they've seen. And from that follows that the <i>only</i> way to become a good programmer is to look at a lot of other people's code.
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 :-)<p>It's telling that CMU is considered such a great tech school. Even the best don't know how to teach programming (yet?).
This essay seems quite relevant: <a href="http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm</a><p>It compares self-taught and college taught programmers to street fighters and martial artists.
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!
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.
The thing about coding is that you <i>have</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>tell</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.