[Tutor] louis renton

[paulf at quillandmouse.com]

On Mon, 23 Jan 2023 13:17:35 +1300
dn via Tutor <tutor at python.org> wrote:

> On 22/01/2023 15.05, paulf at quillandmouse.com wrote:
> > On Sun, 22 Jan 2023 14:43:27 +1300
> > dn via Tutor <tutor at python.org> wrote:
> > 
> > [snip]

No particular disagreement.

When I was a kid, I was endlessly curious. I spent hours at the
library. How do lasers work? What's the chemical composition of
vinegar? How does a car engine operate? I once called a gun shop to
find out what "caliber" really meant, because all the definitions I
could find were so vague.

In 1974, I got access to the school district's mainframe via an
acoustic modem and teletype. I had the idea I'd like to make some
programs, so I searched for what languages the computer knew. They had
BASIC, which sounded like a good idea. I bought a book called "Basic
Basic", and used it as a reference. What if I wanted to calculate how
much a loan would cost at the end of the loan's term? How do you do
math in BASIC? Blah blah blah. 

When I went to college, I asked around about what computer facilities
their were. Unless you were a grad student, you had to punch cards and
submit them to the crew at the comp center. Wait three days. Get back a
printout of how you failed. I was used to near instantaneous, real time
interaction with a computer. And now they wanted me to punch cards and
wait days? Forget it. I never took a computer course. (Mea culpa. This
was actually a bad decision. Had I started taking computer courses, I
might have ended up with a computer science degree instead.)

Then in about 1985 I bought my own desktop computer, and
cast about for a way to make programs (I was actually an electrician at
the time). I found this book/reference/compiler for a language called
Pascal (Borland's Turbo Pascal). I thought of a thing I'd like to make,
and I tried this, consulted the manual, refined it, etc. I wrote quite
a few useful programs. My roommate liked to gamble in Vegas, and I
wrote a program for him to practice blackjack with.

But Pascal was a teaching language. I wanted a "real" programming
language. I looked around and found C. Then I bought "The C Programming
Language", the best language reference I've ever read. I wrote all
kinds of programs in C, and was very comfortable with it. Still am.

Somewhere in the 90s, I got a job coding FoxPro, which I did for a few
years. Then I purchased a company and proceeded to write hundreds of
thousands of lines of PHP code to run the internal infrastructure for
the business-- payroll, AP, AR, customer relations, statistics, job
tracking, etc.

I've found learning most subjects far faster and more effective
when I tackle it on my own. The only exception would be mathematics.
That's me. There are others who simply can't do it without some
structured class time. And yes, employers foolishly consider a degree
more important than thousands of hours of real world experience. They
also consider MCSCs superior to years of working with Linux. But I can
tell you most Linux folks know more about networking than MCSCs ever
will, at least back when I started using Linux. I'm not even a network
admin, but I know more than most of the guys from my ISP who visit me
to fix or replace my modems and routers.

If you're one of those classroom folks, find a community college or an
online resource, like some of those "dn" mentioned. The OP didn't sound
like that type, so I advised him to do what I would do (and have done).

If you need to get a job in programming, then by all means get a
degree. You may not be able to program very well at the end (I can't
say), but you'll be able to get a programming job (hopefully).

It's also worth noting that just because someone hasn't done a full
course of study in a language, that doesn't mean their code isn't good.
Microsoft Windows is full of code written by guys with degrees in CS
and courses in programming. But when I worked for a Microsoft shop back
in the 90s, we had to wipe and reinstall every six months, because
Windows took about that long to self destruct.

Paul

-- 
Paul M. Foster
Personal Blog: http://noferblatz.com
Company Site: http://quillandmouse.com
Software Projects: https://gitlab.com/paulmfoster