Absolutely! One of the difficulties that I have with my intro courses is working out when to introduce the vocabulary correctly, because it is important to be able to engage with the industry and the literature, but it adds a lot of noise to learning the underlying concepts and some assessments end up losing sight of the concept and go straight to recalling the vocab.
Knowing the terms can help you self-learn, but a textbook glossary could do the same thing.
There was a lovely computer science book for kids I can’t remember the name of, and it was all about the evil jargon trying to prevent people from mastering the magical skills of programming and algorithms. I love these approaches. I grew up in an extremely non/anti-academic environment, and I learned to explain things in non-academic ways, and it’s really helped me as an intro lecturer.
Jargon is the mind killer. Shorthands are for the people who have enough expertise to really feel the depths of that shorthand and use it to tickle the old familiar neurons they represent without needing to do the whole dance. It’s easy to forget that to a newcomer, the symbol is just a symbol.
Functional programming is much more math oriented and I think works well here, as it likes to violate a lot of these rules as a rule. I think it’s what makes it so challenging and so obvious for different folks.
C could just be a blank and you have to bit blit the arrow on yourself.
I don’t know why, but I still can’t open a core file without going I’m in. I don’t do QA, though, and so tinkering with final breath of my program frozen in time maintains some novelty.
My two cents, after years of Markdown (and md to PDF solutions) and LaTeX and a full two years of trying to commit to bashing my head against Word for work purposes, I’m really enjoying Typst. It didn’t take long to convert my themes, having docs I can import which are basically just variables to share across documents in a folder has been really helpful. Haven’t gone too deep into it but I’m excited to give it a deeper test run over the next little bit.
+1 to safety razors in general. The disposables always used to make my neck and chin look like a horror film, not for lack of research on using. Switching to safety razors, I only shave around my beard so I use the same blades for a long while and shave infrequently, and I’ve been using the same pack of blades that I bought 5+ years ago. A little cardboard and metal, way less waste, I have a huge supply of razors so I haven’t thought about buying in ages, and I get a way better shave after just a little practice.
And the waste reduction can’t be understated.
Yeah, this is the approach people are trying to take more now, the problem is generally amount of that data needed and verifying it’s high quality in the first place, but these systems are positive feedback loops both in training and in use. If you train on higher quality code, it will write higher quality code, but be less able to handle edge cases or potentially complete code in a salient way that wasn’t at the same quality bar or style as the training code.
On the use side, if you provide higher quality code as input when prompting, it is more likely to predict higher quality code because it’s continuing what was written. Using standard approaches, documenting, just generally following good practice with code before sending it to the LLM will majorly improve results.
Every time. Try to get ahead of your work? Well, good for you, that first 20% went really well, now let’s spend the next two weeks on “work” that interferes with your other needs and needs to get thrown out because there’s no way it’s integrating with the other 80% that needs to happen within the next hour and also everything that you did for the other 20% is useless and needs to be redone now that you broke it with that tangent.
It’s been a painful summer “preparing” to teach my fall courses.
I sit somewhere tangential on this - I think Bret Victor’s thoughts are valid here, or my interpretation of them - that we need to start revisiting our tooling. Our IDEs should be doing a lot more heavy lifting to suit our needs and reduce the amount of cognitive load that’s better suited for the computer anyways. I get it’s not as valid here as other use cases, but there’s some room for improvements.
Having it in separate functions is more testable and maintainable and more readable when we’re thinking about control flow. Sometimes we want to look at a function and understand the nuts and bolts and sometimes we just want to know the overall flow. Why can’t we swap between views and inline the functions in our IDE when we want to see the full flow? In fact, why can’t we see the function inline but with the parameter variables replaced by passed values to get a feel for how the function will flow and compute what can be easily computed (assuming no global state)?
I could be completely off base, but more and more recently - especially after years of teaching introductory programming - I’m leaning more toward the idea that our IDEs should be doubling down on taking advantage of language features, live computation, and co-operating with our coding style… and not just OOP. I’d love to hear some places that I might be overlooking. Maybe this is all a moot point, but I think code design and tooling should go hand in hand.
When I teach story points (not in an official Agile Scrum capacity, just as part of a larger course) I emphasize that the points are for conversation and consensus more than actual estimates.
Saying this story is bigger than that one, and why, and seeing people in something like planning poker give drastically differing estimates is a great way to signal that people don’t really get the story or some major area wasn’t considered. It’s a great discussion tool. Then it also gives a really rough ballpark to help the PO reprioritize the next two sprints before planning, but I don’t think they should ever be taken too seriously (or else you probably wasted a ton of time trying to be accurate on something you’re not going to be accurate on).
Students usually start by using task-hours as their metric, and naturally get pretty granular with tasks. This is for smaller projects - in larger ones, amortizing to just number of tasks is effectively the same as long as it’s not chewing away way more time in planning.
You check the clock. You check again, because you didn’t actually read the time because you were too absorbed in the process of checking the clock that you forgot to check the clock.
You check the clock again. You have a new email. You consider checking the clock again, but give up and accept your fate because checking the clock a (second? Third? Tenth? First?) time is just too much right now, you’re already running late anyways so it was kind of all procrastinating in the first place. You don’t even know what you were supposed to be checking it for. Just wait and see, it’s probably not that important. Maybe you’ll check the clock and see if it sparks your memory.
You check the clock. You finally see the time. The bus drives past you.
The ways we cope and overcome, and the ways we don’t.
I really appreciate hearing this. I was diagnosed ADHD almost a year ago, and it made a lot of things make sense, but therapy continues coming back to, “Yes, definitely the ADHD, it’s obvious now, but there’s just something… else.” I’m going to begin trauma therapy soon, but stumbling upon some information on autism made me immediately recoil and say “That can’t be me”. When I learned a bit more, I realized where the reaction came from. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy avoiding and pushing away those traits. I blocked out a lot of memories as a kid, and as soon as I read about common autistic behaviours in children I started to be able to see those things and remember them and not immediately recoil, but suddenly consider them as something that really happened.
I think that’s the real fear of “high-functioning”, whatever it is, without having a label/diagnosis. Yes, I’m participating in society, I’m doing well, people like me, I’m good at my job - I guess it’s just that the cost of it is everything that makes me me, and if that’s normal, I don’t understand how anyone gets by - and if it isn’t normal, then what is it so much harder for me, and what does it mean for me?
So yeah, I do think I might look into assessment. I think for me, I’ve just pushed myself so hard for so long and blamed myself for so much that painful perseverance is deeply ingrained. Even though I should be able to follow my needs and rhythms without a diagnosis, it’s a lot easier to look at yourself when you can see the full picture and be properly honest.
Plus, masking is exhausting, even when it’s subconscious. Learning about ADHD got me to learn some things I’d been painfully masking without being completely aware. There’s a lot of programming in me that feels natural, but it’s just a reaction to how things “should” be done that really don’t need to be there.
So yeah, I really appreciate the comment, and I think I’ll probably find a lot of commonalities in your journey :)
Even thinking about ASD as a possibility for me is a very new thing, so I don’t know with any certainty I fall here, but learning about “high-functioning” autism as being “successfully masked” has made me seriously begin exploring this. Psychiatrists were hesitant early on to entertain any discussions (edit: of any neurodivergence) because I’d been so successful in school and career, even though I was always dying inside feeling like an imposter in society and not knowing who I am and why every interaction feels so difficult and requires so much effort. Why does just existing feel so deeply uncomfortable?
I wrote off the idea of high-functioning ASD because I certainly didn’t feel high-functioning, despite my successes, because of the feeling of claustrophobia in my own skin. I wrote off any other higher needs because I didn’t have those needs and I’d exhausted a lot of time and effort to not need those supports… Which in hindsight, is probably not typical.
Neurodivergence is so often defined by the ability to fit in and avoid disrupting typical society and norms. I wasn’t depressed enough because I went into work enough days. I wasn’t ADHD enough because I wasn’t disrupting other people’s lives and breaking social rules and got good grades. I wasn’t autistic enough because I learned to to navigate social situations (read: only engaged in social situations where I’m in a position of control or known mutual interest).
“High-functioning” for whom?
Anyways again, I’m new to even remotely considering autism for me, so I apologize if this is wholely unrelated and unrelatable, but whatever flavour my brain is, it tastes a lot worse than it smells (only figuratively… As far as I know).
I’ve gotten by too long and too successfully letting my impulses keep everything chugging along well enough that now that there’s a massive range of responsibility, dependence upon me, and deadlines with major consequences, hoping I’ll impulsively get around to things had begun putting a painful spotlight on previously undiagnosed ADHD.
I think the key to learning is to not do the thing out of impulse, but to train setting a goal of doing the thing and then painstakingly doing nothing until that thing is done. That’s the skill to train, not the thing that’s getting done.
But now, I’ll just wait for the time that that skill is the impulsive thing to work on and keep on keeping on.
Yeah, I think this is an important thing to be aware of. I 100% get and understand the need to reinforce self-worth outside of what’s traditionally pushed. But that’s not the whole story, and I don’t see much on the other side of it.
It’s when you get that anxiety/depression cocktail alongside things, unable to find the motivation to do the things you need to do to feel adequately drained, or unable to do the things that adequately energize.
It’s when you fall flat and feel horrible, not because of a corporate agenda, but because real people depended on you and you couldn’t show up.
It’s when you took the advice, and followed your rhythms of the day, and stopped going against your mental grain… and then you missed your work deadline, or messed up your work and screwed someone over, or accidentally estranged family members, or didn’t get that medical treatment you needed.
It’s really important people don’t tie up in the self-worth of productivity and corporations - it’s really easy to prioritize those because we’re told all of our lives that they’re worth prioritizing - and that leads to us ignoring our own needs… But unless you’re very fortunate, work and productivity are needs, and finding ways to exert energy in a healthy (and often relaxing!) way is important.
I don’t know where I’m going with this.
For anything that isn’t private, ChatGPT has been great for this. Not for everything, but pretty helpful for internal consistency checks or providing a more focused revision list.
Yeah, I may be wrong but I think it usually comes down to a very specific kind of precision needed. It’s not meant to be hostile, I think, but meant to provide a domain-specific explanation clearly to those who need to interpret it in a specific way. In law, specific jargon infers very specific behaviour, so it’s meant to be precise in its own way (not a law major, can’t say for sure), but it can seem completely meaningless if you aren’t prepped for it.
Same thing in other fields. I had a professor who was very pedantic about {braces} vs [brackets] vs (parentheses), and it seemed totally unnecessary to be so corrective in discussions, but when explaining where things went wrong with a student’s work it was vital to be able to quickly differentiate them in their work so they could review the right areas or understand things faster during a lecture later down the line.
But that noise takes longer to teach through, so if it is important, it needs it’s own time to learn, and it will make it inaccessible to anyone who didn’t get that time to learn and digest it.