| Hey this is neat! I was telling my friend the other day. The way you learn programming is by typing code out by hand. And I suggested using LLMs to generate minimal educational examples aligned with his interests and needs. I've tried the Zed Shaw method to learning programming (just typing out code examples by hand -- doing "studies", the same way you would with music or art). I tested it on a programming language I had been learning for a while and was struggling with. After just a few hours of typing my fluency had skyrocketed. I realized that in several hours of typing I had written more code than in weeks of study. Because when you don't know a language yet, producing code is extremely slow and error prone. But typing out correct code is relatively straightforward. So due to changing my approach to "just blindly typing", I got more practice (at least as far as reading and muscle memory goes) in a few hours than the previous few weeks. Now of course understanding is important too, but it's a separate dimension, and largely comes after memory and fluency in my experience. (Understanding something theoretically and being able to use it are two very different things!) The general principle here is Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis of language acquisition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis) which says a baby learns language by just hearing stuff -- just being exposed to inputs -- and that adults can learn the same way too. And I heard it on the excellent website (now defunct?) All Japanese All The Time, where the author tested the hypothesis on himself by mostly listening to a lot of Japanese and gained fluency in a year. https://web.archive.org/web/20080705194055/http://www.alljap... |