A big part of me wants Comparative Coding classes to be taught to college students. Even though I have a pretty sad cautionary tale about Comp Lit classes from a very good friend who went for an English degree.
Some of the earliest conversations I recall were about the trap of taking Comp Lit too seriously and not spending enough time on the craft. Eventually your inner critic creates fear that your work isn't good enough, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
I spent the next decade watching helplessly as the inner critic ate my friend's hopes and dreams one by one. In her head, she was going to be a great fiction writer. But the only thing of hers I ever remembered was her persuasive writing. She was passionate about her causes, but somehow also had it in her head that this wasn't 'real writing', and I didn't have the gravitas to convince her she was wrong.
And so the sad fact is that if you look at what I've written and shown to people, and what she's written and shown to people, it would be charitable to say she's done three times as much as I have, to an audience perhaps ten times as large. Me, who only briefly wanted to be a writer in grade school, whose only college-level English class was a technical writing class.
I am not a Writer, but I write. She is a Writer, and doesn't.
But even so, I've got body parts stuck in this same trap. I write a lot less code that some other people. But I also work hard to make sure that I'm on the right side of the Pareto principle. It's not the lines that count but how you use them, or so I reason. But I've started noticing the consequence of that choice, and trying to find a new balance between quantity and quality. Old habits die hard.
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
The best way to get better at creative pursuits is to create. Then get feedback. As much feedback as you can find.
After I typed that I worried it would be misinterpreted.
Not true as in a something that happened, but true as in the underlying concept.
Gladwell talks about hours of practice, but it has to be conscious practice.
But this parable has always been strange to me because if your target is quantity, it seems errors, in that context, are things that slow you down in production not quality issues.
In Spain, around 1600 and the height of the Spanish empire, there were two particularly well known writers. One was Cervantes (Don Quixote); the other Lope de Vega ("the sheer volume of his literary output is unequalled, making him one of the most prolific authors in the history of literature" [0]).
It makes an interesting case study for this sort of thing. Both were prolific; but Don Quixote is clearly the greatest work in the Spanish corpus despite Lope having vastly more written. But to some degree both authors are remembered.
I think the underlying mechanism is feedback (even your own). The more times you try, see the result, and adjust, the better you’ll get.
You need to either have good taste yourself or an arbiter who can tell you where you went wrong.
Of course at some point you reach a skill level where this no longer works. You still need as many cycles as you can get, but the cycles get longer because it just takes time to do the bigger and better things you can do now.
Deliberate practice is definitely required to improve beyond basic proficiency, but mere practice is what gets you to proficiency. Mistakes will be reduced, but technique may be imperfect.
It depends. Being able to stitch multiple languages together definitely has its “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” aspects to it. Better programming for me is creating or discovering a tool that is useful to me that makes some part of my path to programming better. Building your own version of a language can be a fun way to get better at coding too. Grab the base source of any language and find all the string values and start do a mass search and replace to new ones that don’t exist yet in the language. The problems you will run into will bring you to examine parts of the language you weren’t aware of.
I like this. But I also like to take it as a grain of salt, because bad patterns emerge without large-quantity of work having some wise guidance. And breaking bad habits, specially when encouraging “experienced” folks to do so, is tough.
I've read the opposite, i.e., the best way to become better at writing is to write.
I've certainly found this to be true with programming. I can read great code and books about how to code, but I've really become a better programmer through writing lots of code.
Some of the earliest conversations I recall were about the trap of taking Comp Lit too seriously and not spending enough time on the craft. Eventually your inner critic creates fear that your work isn't good enough, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
I spent the next decade watching helplessly as the inner critic ate my friend's hopes and dreams one by one. In her head, she was going to be a great fiction writer. But the only thing of hers I ever remembered was her persuasive writing. She was passionate about her causes, but somehow also had it in her head that this wasn't 'real writing', and I didn't have the gravitas to convince her she was wrong.
And so the sad fact is that if you look at what I've written and shown to people, and what she's written and shown to people, it would be charitable to say she's done three times as much as I have, to an audience perhaps ten times as large. Me, who only briefly wanted to be a writer in grade school, whose only college-level English class was a technical writing class.
I am not a Writer, but I write. She is a Writer, and doesn't.
But even so, I've got body parts stuck in this same trap. I write a lot less code that some other people. But I also work hard to make sure that I'm on the right side of the Pareto principle. It's not the lines that count but how you use them, or so I reason. But I've started noticing the consequence of that choice, and trying to find a new balance between quantity and quality. Old habits die hard.