Extract Teach Yourself programming in ten years

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• Peter norvig

This article teaches you how to learn programming in a certain way.

Teach Yourself programming in ten yearspeter norvig

Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, grouping, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. there appear to be no real shortcuts: Even audio art, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. in another genre, The Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. but they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success,SGT. Peppers, Was released in 1967. samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: "excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price. "And Chaucer complained" The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

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 semantic tive learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particle individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors. "(P. 20-21) the bookCognition in practice: Mind, mathematics, and culture in everyday lifeIs 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, authorThe 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 through stock options is no doubt much richer than I'll ever be.

• 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 projectsAfterOther 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 ages. include one language that supports class extends actions (like Java or C ++), one that supports functional has action (like Lisp or ml), one that supports syntactic has action (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 cocould be the ansi c ++ committee, or it cocould 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.

With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read allHowBooks, and still felt like a clueless novice. 30 months later, when my second child was due, did I go back to the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts.

Fred Brooks, in his essayNo silver bulletsIdentified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:

1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.

2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.

3. Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.

This assumes that some people already have the qualities necessary for being a great designer; the job is to properly coax them along. alan Perlis put it more succinctly: "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelin wowould have had to be taught how not. so it is with the Great programmers ".

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 solverLawrence erlbaum, 1989.

Lave, Jean,Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics, and culture in everyday life, Cambridge University Press 1988.

Answers

Timing for various operations on a typical 1 GHz PC in summer 2001:

Execute Single Instruction	1 nsec = (1/1, 000,000,000) sec
Fetch word from L1 cache memory	2 nsec
Fetch word from main memory	10 nsec
Fetch word from consecutive disk location	200 nsec
Fetch word from new disk location (seek)	8,000,000 nsec = 8 msec

Peter norvig(Copyright 2001)