Over the weekend, I read
this article along with discussions about it on
Reddit, Hacker News and a related discussion on what it takes to become a talented programmer on
O'Reilly's blog.
It got me thinking about my own path to programming:
0. My first CS course ever was in high school. I did ok, middling at best. It was taught in C++. The Borland compiler we used marked syntax errors the line after they occurred, which caused me a lot of headaches. The final assignment, biggest grade of the class, was to create a game, any game. The brightest kid in the class wrote a poker game using ascii art to actually draw the cards. I thought I was at least as smart as him, so I made a poker game as well, but halfway through writing it, realized I couldn't figure out how to determine what hand a player was dealt, so I did what any industrious 10th grader would do. I rigged the game. Every hand dealt to the player was all hearts and it always printed out:
You have a flush!I did not go to college hoping to earn a degree in Computer Science.
1. As a biology undergrad, though, I did have to take an introductory computer science class. It was in C. What I had learned in High School was sufficient enough that I slept through every class and aced every homework assignment. In retrospect, it probably set unrealistic expectations for courses to come.
2. The summer after my freshman year, during a summer internship in a bio lab, I found myself spending every waking moment in the library reading technical computer books. The campus had a network of vending machines with student id card readers attached that would, when swiped, bill your student account. I noticed that they left the phone line that connected them to the campus network exposed, and was convinced that if only I knew a little bit more about TCP/IP I could send the machine someone else's student id number and get free Snickers for the duration of my internship. I never succeeded, but at the end of the internship nothing I had still to study in biology seemed as appealing as figuring out the answers to all of the questions my reading had stirred up. That fall semester, I enrolled in CS.
3. My Operating Systems class made the most sense of any class I took as a CS major. Each assignment covered a separate system call and that system call would be printed at the top of the assignment handout, verbatim from the man page. Combined with a good specification of exactly what our program was supposed to output and how we were to deal with error conditions meant that in order to turn in a working program, all I had to do was read the assignment and the man pages enough times to put statements together in the right order. I won't even pretend that I understood how my assignment to write a primitive shell worked, I had just read the execv man page enough times that by sheer combinatorial probability it had to work.
4. Many people in the comments on the article and in the forums noted that while initially programming may not make sense to a lot of people, sometimes, out of the blue it will "click" for a student. I actually had an "Aha" moment
during a final as time was being called. The last question on the last test of Computer Architecture and Assembly Programming, asked what instruction was equivalent to popping the top of the call stack. I will never accuse anyone of having a dumb, blank stare again as my slack expression betrayed that fact that somewhere inside my cranium, hexadecimal notation, the von Neumann architecture, Intel memory addressing and the 8086 instruction set were coalescing into actual understanding. Even more amazing was that my brain took those tiny electrical impulses and mechanically translated them into little carbon-graphite scratches representing a correct answer. I remember leaving the test, talking to a fellow student for whom that question had not ignited any cranial conflagrations and despite the urge to prove my superiority, I withheld my hard won answer from him, realizing that sometimes the possession of knowledge comes secondary to its acquisition.
The common thread of my education, though, I think, was that I never really questioned why things worked the way they did or worried that I didn't have as much control over them as I wanted. In High School I never questioned why I wrote
int main(char* argc, char** argv) even though I had no idea what those two arguments were, nor ever used them in my programs, nor (until my infamous OS shell assignment) questioned how those values would ever be populated.
More
theologically inclined students wanted to know why the for loop looked the way it did or pouted when they knew that they wanted their code to be compiled, but could not properly translate that knowledge into a series of dashes and letters that gcc would understand.
I never questioned the magical gcc incantation that was usually provided to me. Cryptic error messages, I felt deep down, were
my fault. It is this same suspicion that persists in me even today, keeping me from writing copious amounts of bug reports for the software I use.
I did know I hated C++ and liked C, though I had seen the phrase C/C++ bandied about so often that I thought that they were merely two different styles of writing the same language, sort of like the distinction between which style of brace indentation you chose.
And once, while practicing for a programming contest, competing against my advising professor, he blew my mind by writing some 4 or 5 line string function in C that I had written with 1 in Java, and like the master to the grasshopper, asked my how mine could still be slower.
There were more classes, but I was a college student and blissfully unaware of the totality with which my life after college would be consumed with, well, life after college and I tried not to let too many more painful epiphanies erupt inside my skull. Departed from college for a handful of years, I now work with very smart people that force these epiphanies on me cruelly and with great relish. Its probably why our company has been as successful as it has been and makes me wonder just what their path to programming was.
So, to end of this heinously long post, I completely agree with whoever it was that said "A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing".
