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Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language

128 points by andsoitis

by chao-

6 subcomments

In the early 2000's, I entered a university at the EXACT trough between the Dotcom Crash and the Web 2.0 Moment. In fact, I transferred from a lower-tier uni to a top-tier CS uni. At the time, they had still retained their "weed out" approach to intro CS (in Lisp) from the late 90's, hoping to keep kids from taking CS while thinking "I'll make a website and money will rain from the skies!"
My new uni completely rejected my previous uni's Intro CS curriculum. They forced me to retake their version: A Lisp-then-Java cycle that was a theoretical whiplash, which initially I resented. Who wants to re-take a class for topics they "already" learned?
By my second year, I saw the light. I understood the approach.
While my highschool friends at other unis had courses to learn {{topic}} and separate courses to learn {{language}}, the uni I was at had a policy of "languages are incidental" for most courses. Professors had a list of the languages that they would accept for projects. "Anything but Perl" was common, although "systems" courses required C. For every class with a required language, it was not taught during class. There would be an optional lab that you could attend to learn at least one of the languages allowed for the course. The expectation was that you could learn enough in two or three weeks before the first project kicked off, and the TAs really were there to help you figure it out (most courses had 20-30 students for 2-3 TAs).
The "bookend" intro courses that taught extreme FP and extreme OOP served as a forcing function that made me realize "Oh, languages really don't matter. Just pick up the details for the paradigm, and get on with the work."
As much as I resented having to "redo" an intro course cycle at first, I am forever grateful for the fearlessness that the overall experienced instilled in me.

by mettamage

7 subcomments

> Reading code, mostly. Tracing data through five layers of someone else's design choices. Forming a hypothesis about why the bug is happening, then testing the hypothesis, then narrowing. Recognising that the function in front of you is too big and asking what part of it has its own reason to exist. Recognising that the schema in front of you encodes a decision someone made in 2019 and that the decision is now load-bearing for things they did not anticipate. Knowing which of the five tempting cleanups in the file is going to bite you in production and which is safe.
It always struck me as strange that universities never had a course that would teach open source code. As in: grab a repo of a popular open source project, read part of it and do your best to create a contribution in it.
The lectures should be about different open source projects and their design choices.

by p4bl0

1 subcomments

I'm responsible for a CS bachelor degree in France (licence informatique). In our curriculum, we teach how to learn programming and then programming paradigms, not languages, and we use a lot of different programming languages for that from the first semester. At the end of the first year, our students have already approached 4 programming paradigms using ~10 different programming languages, during the second year this is reinforced by the introduction of a new paradigm (OOP) and some more advanced course using different languages (for example the introduction to functional programming in the first year mostly uses Racket, but our second functional programming course in the second year uses OCaml).

by jmspring

0 subcomment

Grew up with this guy. We both did community college courses on programming before we were out out high school. I'm impressed with the library he's built up and CCs tend to be more pragmatic than UCs in California.
This isn't a plug/whatever - just good content from an old friend.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorHankStalica

by ergocoder

3 subcomments

To be fair, to learn to think, you have to learn the language first.
Learning to program without knowing the language is useless and counter-productive.
Of course, this doesn't mean you have to learn 10+ languages first... but you have to learn a real programming language (not a toy one) before you can learn to program.
Edit: * a language

by pillars

0 subcomment

Sorry I am pasting my old comment here, but the intention is same Before learning programming one should know what is computing in general? It sets good mental model, after that you can easily pickup and start writing program yourself .
Data, data, data :)))
Some basic notions to know: Input → Computation → Output
Information is omnipresent (this is just an intuition, not a claim). It serves as both input and output.
Computation—also known as a procedure, function, set of instructions, transformation, method, algorithm, or calculation.
In my early days, I ignored the fundamental notion of data and procedures. But eventually, it clicked: Programs = Data + Instructions
Watch Feynman on computing—he even starts with the same concept of data, introducing computers as information processing systems. And processing requires algorithms (i.e., instructions or procedures).
Programming is simply writing instructions for the computer to perform computations.
A computer is just a machine for computing.
Computation is a general idea: a transformation of one form of information into another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPO_model
Richard Feynman Computer Science Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
Old documentry on programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFZecokdHLo
George Hotz video: what is programming? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2bXEUSAiTI
https://denninginstitute.com/pjd/GP/gp_overview.html
https://htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum-Z-H-5.html#node_...
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/texico/

by hemc4

0 subcomment

It started with all courses teaching algorithms but on the day job you wrote all algorithms by searching it on web or via a library.
Now they teach language but you just ask agents to check the accuracy of code and rarely read it.
Only few devs wrote new algorithms and only few devs will now write the actual new code. These few devs don't need courses but all other devs need to pretend that they are part of these "few" so they need all the courses, just in case...

0 subcomment

by djmips

0 subcomment

https://cs.ossu.dev/coursepages/spd/ UBC teaches programming

by ChicagoDave

0 subcomment

I’m convinced my love of grocery store checkout logic puzzle books are the foundation of my programming skills. I was also good in tenth grade geometry which is all logic.

by sn9

0 subcomment

How to Design Programs: https://htdp.org/2026-2-25//Book/index.html

by webxsid

0 subcomment

I agree with the sentiment, except you learn these things on the job, by making mistakes and asking questions.

by hackthemack

1 subcomments

Yeah, but most* companies hire for just whatever X programming language they use, and do not care if you know how to program and do not care that you could pick up whatever X is in a couple of weeks. (Anecdotally for "most", I am sure there are exceptions)

0 subcomment

by tokkkie

0 subcomment

junior ask: how to start programming? me: write process in natural language first. no code yet. ...whatever you do, don't write code yet.

by eager_learner

0 subcomment

it appears to me that there may be a gate-keeping involved that stops the hordes from really learning how to program.
Look at the books on programming in the last 15 years--none teaches how to program and problem-solve.

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

Aside: so this guy pops up 3 days ago with this vibecoded sort of site and is epically AI-blogging so now we have three posts on the front page at the same time-ish? Great. Take it easy OP.

by Pxtl

0 subcomment

It's funny, I learned a pile of languages in my undergrad and some UML nonsense. None of it covered properly how to write code that was meant to be read, which IMHO is one of the most basic things.
Just "hey nobody can understand why that line is the way it is, what should we do about that" is probably one of the basic building-block skills of developing on a team, and you teach it wholly by abusing prima donna cowboys until they write something legible or quit.

by corygiltner

2 subcomments

Alright, this website is horrible to read and feels like MySpace in 2002. Did anyone actually spend time and read this? Or are we all just riffing off the title?

by stackedinserter

3 subcomments

If you want to be a good developer, learn to program.
If you want to be a well-paid developer, learn leetcode.

by somewhatgoated

0 subcomment

Who still does boot camps in $currentyear?
You can get all these fundamentals for free and probably better from an LLM.