Re: Understanding users & interfaces

>>>>> "ML" == Marty Landman <[email protected]> writes:

  ML> Playing devil's advocate for a moment Drew, I remember compsci 1.1 at
  ML> Brooklyn College - I took the course because needed science credits,
  ML> had no idea what it'd be about (this was late 70's btw) and knew I was
  ML> not good at the 'hard' sciences.

  ML> Anyway, me and two others got easy A's. Most everyone else it seemed
  ML> had no idea what was going on. And it's always struck me that I had no
  ML> idea what problems they could possibly have, no clue why the material
  ML> presented any challenge at all.

hey, i took CS classes at brooklyn college in the summer between my
junior and senior year of HS. also after i graduated. i also whizzed
through and got A's when many of the others had trouble. my 'smart'
older brother took some programming class there and was horrible at
it. he never got the concept of controlled logic down. i don't think
that all people can learn to program 'well'. it is a skill like anything
else is a skill. most people can learn the rudiments of almost any
skill. getting good at a skill requires a combination of natural
talent/ability and training and experience. we see this all the time
with sports. anyone can learn to play any game. even those blessed with
great talent still need training and seasoning to be the best. i look
back upon my own history and realize how little i actually knew way back
when compared to how much i thought i knew then. 30 years of coding
experience is not something anyone learning code quickly can get. so
this talk about how anyone can code is garbage. sure they can. now have
them write an rtos, or a device driver, or a protocol stack all without
memory leaks or buffer overflow bugs or whatever. they won't be able to
do it. programming in the large and real world is not writing matt's
cgi scripts which can be done by kiddies.

too bad employers have to relearn that lesson every decade or so. the
bubble hired every jerk who claimed he could code. hopefully they have
all left the profession by now and the real pros can get jobs again.

uri

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Uri Guttman  ------  [email protected]  -------- http://www.stemsystems.com
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