Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Bloom
(1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes
(1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it
takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of
areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph
operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in
neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts:
even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years
before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the
Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an
appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing
small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had
mass appeal early on, their first great critical success,
Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought it
took longer than ten years: "Excellence in any department can be
attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at
a lesser price." And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained "the lyf so short, the craft
so long to lerne." Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa,
vita brevis", which is part of the longer quotation "Ars longa, vita
brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium
difficile", which in English renders as "Life is short, [the] craft
long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment
difficult." Although in Latin, ars can mean either art or
craft, in the original Greek the word "techne" can only mean "skill", not "art".
Here's my recipe for programming success:
- Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure
that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.
- Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important
than any book or training course.
- Program. The best kind of learning is learning
by doing. To put it more technically, "the maximal level of
performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained
automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of
performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as
a result of deliberate efforts to improve." (p. 366)
and "the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an
appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual,
informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections
of errors." (p. 20-21) The book
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday
Life is an interesting
reference for this viewpoint.
- If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.
- Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer
on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you're the best,
you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire
others with your vision. When you're the worst, you learn what the
masters do, and you learn what they don't like to do (because they
make you do it for them).
- Work on projects after other programmers. Be involved in
understanding a program written by someone else. See what it takes to
understand and fix it when the original programmers are not
around. Think about how to design your programs to make it easier for
those who will maintain it after you.
- Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one
language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that
supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one
that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one
that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++
templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and
one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).
- Remember that there is a "computer" in "computer science". Know
how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a
word from memory (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk. (Answers here.)
- Get involved in a language
standardization effort. It could be the ANSI C++ committee, or it
could be deciding if your local coding style will have 2 or 4 space
indentation levels. Either way, you learn about what other people
like in a language, how deeply they feel so, and perhaps even a little
about why they feel so.
- Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.
Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullets identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:
- Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.
- Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.
- Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.
So go ahead and buy that Java book; you'll probably get some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours, days, or even months.