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by otabdeveloper4 1303 days ago
Mutable variables are not intuitive for beginners. Out there in the "real world", non-programmers will happily write extremely complex Excel spreadsheets, SQL queries and even Pandas/Jupyter notebooks, but will become completely stumped even by simple for loops.

People will handle even very complex code as long as it's "just math formulas", but add mutation and temporal reasoning into the mix and it immediately causes cognitive overload.
1 comments
eternalban 1303 days ago
Sorry, "temporal reasoning" is not on the table. And if someone is having problem dealing with loops then recursion must be completely beyond them and rocket science.

The examples you give are symptomatic of usage patterns, and the tools you name lend themselves to copy-paste constructs for beginners. That is all.

p.s.

> non-programmers will happily write extremely complex Excel spreadsheets, SQL queries and even Pandas/Jupyter notebook

but for the life of them would not be able to troubleshoot if the copy-paste operation had a hiccup.

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otabdeveloper4 1303 days ago
Sorry, you just haven't dealt with any real-world scenarios and real-world people.

Yes, recursion is not acceptable.

No, this isn't about copy-paste. In the "real world" non-coders produce write-only code. (Nobody can read or reproduce somebody else's "formulas", but they will happily write their own, spanning multiple pages.)

Troubleshooting and writing complex code is acceptable for non-coders, as long as the programming language is not Turing complete. (The human brain seems to have real trouble processing Turing-complete constructs, it is somethig that needs explicit training. Recursion or loops doesn't matter.)

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eternalban 1302 days ago
> Sorry, you just haven't dealt with any real-world scenarios and real-world people.

I've been a professional s/e since 1986. Have seen quite a bit and all varieties of dev teams, rest assured.

> In the "real world"

You seem to be arguing for the merits of e.g. Exel type of programming, which I have not addressed at all. We were actually discussing "beginners".

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