Here's my recipe for programming success:
- Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure
that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.
- Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important
than any book or training course.
- Program. The best kind of learning is learning
by doing. To put it more technically, "the maximal level of
performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained
automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of
performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as
a result of deliberate efforts to improve." (p. 366)
and "the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an
appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual,
informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections
of errors." (p. 20-21) The book
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday
Life is an interesting
reference for this viewpoint.
- If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.
- Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer
on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you're the best,
you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire
others with your vision. When you're the worst, you learn what the
masters do, and you learn what they don't like to do (because they
make you do it for them).
- Work on projects after other programmers. Be involved in
understanding a program written by someone else. See what it takes to
understand and fix it when the original programmers are not
around. Think about how to design your programs to make it easier for
those who will maintain it after you.
- Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one
language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that
supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one
that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one
that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++
templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and
one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).
- Remember that there is a "computer" in "computer science". Know
how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a
word from memory (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk. (Answers here.)
- Get involved in a language
standardization effort. It could be the ANSI C++ committee, or it
could be deciding if your local coding style will have 2 or 4 space
indentation levels. Either way, you learn about what other people
like in a language, how deeply they feel so, and perhaps even a little
about why they feel so.
- Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.
Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullets
identified a three-part plan for finding great
software designers:
- Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.
- Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.
- Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.
So go ahead and buy that Java book; you'll probably get some use out of it.
But you won't change your life, or your real overall expertise as a
programmer in 24 hours, days, or even months.
References
Bloom, Benjamin (ed.) Developing Talent in Young People, Ballantine, 1985.
Brooks, Fred, No Silver Bullets, IEEE Computer, vol. 20, no. 4, 1987, p. 10-19.
Hayes, John R., Complete Problem Solver Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989.
Chase, William G. & Simon, Herbert A.
"Perception in Chess"
Cognitive Psychology, 1973, 4, 55-81.
Lave, Jean, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday
Life, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Answers
Approximate timing for various operations on a typical 1GHz PC in summer 2001:execute single instruction | 1 nanosec = (1/1,000,000,000) sec |
fetch word from L1 cache memory | 2 nanosec |
fetch word from main memory | 10 nanosec |
fetch word from consecutive disk location | 200 nanosec |
fetch word from new disk location (seek) | 8,000,000 nanosec = 8 millisec |
Appendix: Language Choice
Several people have asked what programming language they should learn first. There is no one answer, but consider these points:- Use your friends. When asked "what operating system should I use, Windows, Unix, or Mac?", my answer is usually: "use whatever your friends use." The advantage you get from learning from your friends will offset any intrinsic difference between OS, or between programming languages. Also consider your future friends: the community of programmers that you will be a part of if you continue. Does your chosen language have a large growing community or a small dying one? Are there books, web sites, and online forums to get answers from? Do you like the people in those forums?
- Keep it simple. Programming languages such as C++ and Java are designed for professional development by large teams of experienced programmers who are concerned about the run-time efficiency of their code. As a result, these languages have complicated parts designed for these circumstances. You're concerned with learning to program. You don't need that complication. You want a language that was designed to be easy to learn and remember by a single new programmer.
- Play. Which way would you rather learn to play the piano: the normal, interactive way, in which you hear each note as soon as you hit a key, or "batch" mode, in which you only hear the notes after you finish a whole song? Clearly, interactive mode makes learning easier for the piano, and also for programming. Insist on a language with an interactive mode and use it.
Appendix: Books and Other Resources
Several people have asked what books and web pages they should learn from. I repeat that "book learning alone won't be enough" but I can recommend the following:- Scheme: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelson & Sussman) is probably the best introduction to computer science, and it does teach programming as a way of understanding the computer science. You can see online videos of lectures on this book, as well as the complete text online. The book is challenging and will weed out some people who perhaps could be successful with another approach.
- Scheme: How to Design Programs (Felleisen et al.) is one of the best books on how to actually design programs in an elegant and functional way.
- Python: Python Programming: An Intro to CS (Zelle) is a good introduction using Python.
- Python: Several online tutorials are available at Python.org.
- Oz: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (Van Roy & Haridi) is seen by some as the modern-day successor to Abelson & Sussman. It is a tour through the big ideas of programming, covering a wider range than Abelson & Sussman while being perhaps easier to read and follow. It uses a language, Oz, that is not widely known but serves as a basis for learning other languages. <