Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners

Re:Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners by badloginagain on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @01:02PM (#11074567)

> all of these technical reading skills need to be practiced. beginners frequently make the mistake of denying themselves opportunities to practice those skills by simply asking for someone to tell them the answer.

These are skills that develop over a programmers career. And when you have issues like getting a for loop going, or if you can have a for loop in a while loop, then reading the documentation is not going to be very useful. Again, information density and assumed level of programming competence in source documentation won't help if you are trying to figure out fundamental programming issues.

Should people read documentation, of course, but the usefulness of documentation increases with programming ability.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners by metaphorm on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @04:50PM (#11076344)

I agree. Total beginners do deserve more patience and more explicit instruction. Novice and Intermediate programmers who have learned the basics and are looking to learn more are the ones who really need the practice in "learning how to find your own answer".

[ Parent | on HN ]