[jaabe]

I don’t think stackoverflow is a problem at all, I think it’s much better to have people ask stupid questions than to call them stupid.

That being said, I do think people owe it to themselves to read the documentation first. I’m extremely rarely in a situation where the official documentation isn’t monumentally better than every other option. There are a few exceptions of course, when the official documentation flat out sucks.

I do think we have a general issue with how we teach CS though. Especially outside the hardcore CS degree, because we’re really not teaching young people computation anymore, we’re teaching them how to produce results. This is especially true for places like Udemy and YouTube, but it’s frankly also true on more UX centric or academy/bachelor level degrees.

I do external examinations on academy levels, and earlier this year I went to a place where they teach associate degrees in CS. Only they opted to build their places as a “gaming education”, so they had a heavy emphasis on Unity. And sure enough, the students were pretty good at unity, but only a handful of them knew how to calculate Big O of a few simple examples and only a single student knew how a computer actually works.

When I did my own freshman year, one of my first tests was to decode a hidden message by altering the contents of a bitmap file using C. That’s pretty useless, sure, but it teaches you a lot of things, including how to read the official documentation for a bitmap, which is a much more useful skill than knowing how to use a certain version of some framework. At least in my opinion.

[madez]

It seems to me there is some kind of political war going on when it comes to education about computers.

One side argues, they must know what a computer is, how it roughly works, what it can do and cannot do, and how you can program it.

The other side says, knowing how to use Microsoft Office and Excel, and Facebook and Instagram 'responsibly' is enough, and they fight tooth and nails that the education doesn't become deeper.

This is my experience in Germany, though, where digitalization is understood as replacing books by tablet computers from Apple in school.

Have you made similar experiences?

Edit: Let me reiterate on that. I think part of the fierce resistance against deeper education is fueled by fear.

To explain that, I see how mathematics is used in schools as a rough intelligence test. And the results in math are important, not because people would need differentiation of nested functions at work, but because the grade in math is used as a proxy by the society.

Abstract thinking is difficult for many. And they dislike it. A fundamental education in computers requires abstract thinking. So with that, there would be even more filterng between those who think good, and those that don't. People are afraid of that. So they fight that change.

I think people are afraid of loosing out and becoming meaningless and irrelevant in a world of computers, i.e. a world of abstract thinking.

[tim333]

>One side argues, they must know ...how you can program it

>The other...fight tooth and nails

I'd guess a big part of the problem is many teachers not being able to program. After all programming jobs tend to pay more than teaching ones and even with those there are issues eg https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Anecdote when I was like 15 we had a computer class but the teacher didn't have a clue and I ended up showing the others how to do 10 PRINT "some stuff"; 20 GOTO 10 etc

[Faark]

Feels like what you are describing was the state of affairs like 15 years ago when i was in secondary school. We had an "Informationstechnischer Grundkurs" teaching office / excel and a separate programming course for guys like me who wanted to focus on that. I don't really follow the state of education that closely, but would be quite surprised if the latter is not at least more widely available now.

Does everyone need to know how to program? I don't know, probably not. Us humans specializing is the only way we have to handle the huge amount of knowledge necessary to support our society. I certainly would have a hard time just surviving by myself. Also education slots are limited, we'd have to abolish other courses in exchange. This obviously will generate opposition.

Now let imagine we have an open slot to teach "CS" for 90min a week for a year in such a young age. What do you teach that would actually be useful to most of them later on? A bit of python? Basic C, since it doesn't come with many complicated abstractions on top? Javascript, since many of its courses quickly give colorful results? Even the programming bachelor I later did had trouble answering those questions, they switched from c->java->c++ to teaching 3 courses java. Plus all the languages other courses used and had to teach pretty much from scratch.

[zrobotics]

Personally, I think there is far too much focus on 'which language', rather than on the fundamentals of how to think/reason about a program, troubleshooting, and exposure to the actual documentation. Once you have a solid grasp of one language, picking up others becomes much easier. So someone who only has Javascript experience would likely be able to at least grok the basic structure of a c++ program. I feel the main problem with all the intro courses I have ever taken was too much reliance on textbooks/tutorials, and too much desire to over-simplify. I remember multiple people I took CS101 (Java) with who had no idea how to do anything outside of eclipse, and when they wanted to expand their skills through self-study had no idea how to use the documentation in a helpful manner. They knew how to write a class diagram, but all functions & classes had been introduced piecemeal, so they got overwhelmed looking at the official docs & just gave up out of frustration.

That said, I don't think something like haskell or straight assembler is a good choice, but any of the C-likes or Python would be fine, the differences just aren't great enough to matter much for the absolute beginner. A strong case could be made for Javascript, simply for ease of development, since any computer is almost guaranteed to have the basic software for writing, executing, & debugging. It is far from my favorite language, but for early intro courses I think pedagogy is far more important than language or tooling.

And personally, I feel that the only 'CS' that should be required for all students is keyboarding. Does someone who wants to go into the trades (excepting trades like machining) really have any urgent need for programming? However, almost any job will require typing skills.

Students have limited time, and I think it's foolish to force everyone to learn to program. Those classes have their benefits, but so do music classes. But, given avaliable time and resources, should we also require all students to learn an instrument?

[mtreis86]

The mindset I have seen is less fear, more "if I don't understand this, how could anyone else?"

[AnimalMuppet]

Hmm. So if the teacher doesn't understand anything deeper, then the teacher is probably going to resist making the class deeper. That would make perfect sense.

[vonmoltke]

> The other side says, knowing how to use Microsoft Office and Excel, and Facebook and Instagram 'responsibly' is enough, and they fight tooth and nails that the education doesn't become deeper.

I have certainly encountered efforts to ignore or deprioritize deeper education, but I have yet to meet active opposition to it. What form does it take, and what is the rationale?

[malvosenior]

I think you're right but there's more to it. When you can succeed by using your brain and technology, it doesn't matter so much who your parents are. The thing is we still have a massive legacy of wealth and power fueled by inheritance and other non-meritocratic systems.

This is why you see old media, non-STEM academia and other classic playgrounds of the rich first in line to bash tech. It's an existential threat to their power and control over society.

[nkrisc]

I don't think it's as much about stupid questions or reading docs, stupid questions can be OK and sometimes people just haven't learned there are loads of docs yet. Instead, when you read SO questions, for example, there some you can tell are coming from a place of, "just tell me what to do" and not "how can I do this?"

I work in UX design and I see similar things on site related to that field. It's becoming popular so you can tell when some people think, "If I do X and Y then I am now magically a UX designer (or programmer)." Sometimes they literally ask, "how do I become a UX designer?" You can spot the smart beginners because they ask, "what is UX design?" The former is only interested in the destination while the latter is interested in the journey.

They're not interested in learning out even in the field itself, they just want to style themselves as such and simply ask others how to do the magical rituals required that they have no actual understanding of.

It's a fine line, because by no means am I lumping all beginners into this category. These people happen to look a lot like beginners, but even the real beginners are more knowledgeable.

[tomcam]

> I’m extremely rarely in a situation where the official documentation isn’t monumentally better than every other option.

Man, opposite experience here. I will cheerfully admit to being way less smart than most HN users, but I find that official documentation almost always lacks egregiously in example code, and also in overview material that gives me a 30,000’ view of the product. So often documentation seems assume that I’m already familiar with the product, when sometimes I’m dropped in for some external reason and just want to get a job done without being an expert.

[jaabe]

I don’t think it has anything to do with intelligence, I think it has to do with experience.

Documentation can take some getting used to, and like I said, sometimes it really sucks, but I’ve found it to be worthwhile.

I mean technically you can probably google solve how to handle a bitmap in C, but that won’t teach you how the bitmap format works, so the next time you need to do it again, you’ll probably have to turn to google again. Where as I still have a pretty good idea on what to do, even though it’s been a decade since I touched C and even longer since I played around with bitmaps.

Don’t get me wrong, I say these things, not because I think I’m smarter than anyone, but because I forget everything I quick solve through google programming myself.

[JudgeWapner]

> where the official documentation isn’t monumentally better than every other option

Let me tell you my problem with documentation, with this example (embellished to emphasize my point): say you're looking at the man page for this new, unfamiliar linux command `abc`. Here, "a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z". That's the documentation, in fact it's the documentation for ALL linux commands. What's wrong? Can't make `abc` work for your use case? OH, that's your fault because you didn't know the one particular sequence to arrange those 27 characters (include the space) to actually give you the information you need. You just didn't read hard enough. I mean, there's only 36^2000 or so combinations. Just keep arranging them until the letters spell out the answer to your query!

Thats why SO is way more popular than RTFM. TFM never tells me what I want. They tell me an encyclopedic, exhaustive treatise on `abc`. They don't tell me something helpful, examples on how to use `abc` to get me from point A to point B.

Here's a toy example, I wish I could think of a real one but I'm on the spot and can't recall somthing concrete, but this happens to me constantly. Also, disclaimer: no matter what example I give, someone is going to shoot me down by searching the man page and 'proving me wrong', but I've been Linux-ing for 20 years and I can't tell you a single time a man page has helped me. Generalize with me here, and dont focus on this command in particular. Say I want to use rsync and ssh. Yeah I know about scp, but there was just an HN discussion a few days ago about how that's "bad", so unless I remember their commands, I might think, "ah, I'll just read the handy rsync man page and that will show me how". Now, here's what actually happens:

man rsync:

<huge paragraphs telling me shit I already know, that rsync transmits files>

<-A does some obscure, esoteric thing that I dont care about>

<-a does almost the same thing as A, but was kept for "Sys-V compatibilty, deprecated">

<-b ....> ... <-r getting close,>

<-s ah , secure mode>

. ok cool, but in all likelihood, it wont tell you HOW to use secure mode. just that -s turns secure mode on. ok, do I just tap -s and magically rsyncs are now secure? Oh, HELL NO! no, no no. First, you have to know that -s has to go before the file you want to transmit. Should the man page tell you that? oh, HELL NO! They'll just let you type it wrong, get the error, and get really frustrated (or just go to google and type "how to rsync+ssh " and get the answer immediately). so going back to my "arrange the letters" analogy, you just have to arrange the -s before, after, or in between the options until it works. The man page is USELESS.

Again, this isnt intended to be a real example. I don't know what -s does for rsync. But I DO know if I were to try to read the rsync man page to do rsync+ssh, without fail, any options documented will not work or do what I want them to, usually because the order they are typed or the format of their arguments are conveniently omitted from the so-called documentation. I used to think it was my fault for pathologically composing the args wrong, but I've come to realize it's that the docs are written by people who already know or wrote the commands, so they omit the most obvious steps, or they don't "test" the man pages (which, arguable for FOSS, maybe they shouldn't. But it doesn't change the fact that the documentation sucks).

Me: "which president authored the New Deal?"

Man page: "`presidents`, displays a complete biography of all US presidents.

<-n> displays the biography of the n-th president. Note, to increase frustration levels, search functionality is disabled for this page. If you want to find out about a specific president, you can just start at 0 and read all of their biographies until you find what you need.

me: "maybe the answer is on SO."

smug hackers: "what a noob, people don't even read the docs these days"

[bluedino]

In this case, s/stupid/lazy.

[malvosenior]

If you're lazy about learning for long enough you'll end up stupid.