This is why I'm not the boss

I get too frustrated with people who just don't care

@placeboza: perhaps you should be the boss so you can not employ people who don't care ?

@mccraigmccraig: lol, true, but that brings me to another reason I'm not the boss: I'm a techie with very poor business skills - and very little passion in that direction. TL;DR: Lots of crazy ideas, but no business skill.

I do want to put more effort into hobby projects though, I've been stagnating for years now

not too badly though, I mean, I can use Clojure a bit 😛

@placeboza: ha, then you should go work for a company where the boss cares that everyone cares, or you should start such a company with such a person

agreed . I used to work for such a company. And then the boss demoted himself 😞

i/you/we are fortunate to be in a career/industry/century where this is possible !

true, and I wouldn't change my line of work for the world. Been a coder since I was 12, and never doubted it.

Only explored why

I find it fascinating that more than half the population is incapable of coding at a decent level

and it's little to do with coding

and everything to do with mental modelling

btw, I mean incapable of learning to code at a decent level

statistically

you have a source for that stat ?

knew you would ask 😄 .. let me try dig it out

i've always assumed that a large part of it is lack of interest in learning... much as i will never play golf well because i have a total lack of interest in putting in the time and effort to learn how

Ah I see I got it via Jeff Atwood here: http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/

turns out the lack of interest is only a small part of it

but in some cases, it looks the same. cos when someone struggles with it, and gives up, it may appear to be just a lack of interesting

*interest

e.g. my wife

tried the simple aptitude test on her

and she couldn't bring herself to finish it even

it was like torture for her to try work it out

I still have hopes that she can learn web design

Btw, I used to have the simple aptitude test similar to what Jeff is talking about .. his one there looks a bit different to me

but I think it's just copied from that paper

trying to find the one I used

Interesting! As a tutor, I read these studies trying to figure out learning pitfalls, to somehow negate them so learners can indeed learn.

yup, interesting angle

I used to think anybody could learn to code. and I still think it might be technically possible, but now I accept that the gap might be too large

of course when I say 'code' I don't mean writing an if statement

I mean being able to mentally model a problem and solution and code it out

thinking now of Chris Granger's latest post about coding vs comprehension & composition

Like... in:

int a = 10;
int b = 20;
a = b;

sure, but even if you get it wrong, you can get the question right

cos they aren't marking based on correct answers

they mark based on consistent interpretation

wrong model = wrong answer, but always consistent = +1

Ah, ok... makes sense. I'd better read more carefully, thanks.

yip, it's about making a consistent mental model

not getting it right

either the person can't be consistent, or can't make a model in their mind at all

(when they fail I mean)

Yeah, it's really hard. I tried teaching two coworkers how SQL worked. That first class failed. - Turns out one of them really wants to know the fundamentals, because she hates swiss-cheese knowledge. So since Feb, we fought our way up from NAND gates... to machine-language... to how Unix processes & inodes work... to TCP/IP stack. It will be about two weeks before we start performing programming in a high-level language. - Turns out both people have veerrrry different interests. Had to split the class. Because the other one really just wanted to make a fancy HTML signature and that's it! 😛

And so I look at traditional ways of learning, and can't see how they work. It's so one-size-fits-all... and they filter out those who don't learn that way.

yah... I remember reading something else about that you might like, just need to remember where

about different people learning in different ways

not the visual/auditory whatever

more about the what/how/why

Ah cool, was it maybe a Bret Victor talk, or one of the Alan Kay ones? The Humane Representation of Thought was hugely influential to us.

http://worrydream.com/#!/TheHumaneRepresentationOfThoughtTalk

no but that looks interesting too

can't find the one I'm thinking of 😕

To use more of the brain's resources, we gave personalities to logic gates. (`and` is kind of a jerk. or is a hippie. not likes to disagree. or can often be so love & peace but it often relies on and to do its dirty work.)

lol

clever idea

easier to remember

and relate to

Then we talked about some meetings, where I'd be like xor -- I'd be really suspicious if she and someone else agreed. So I'm only happy if they disagreed.

Meetings actually kinda work as another example of logic gates, because we're so used to human interactions... 😛

seems nuts that you have to go to that level before people can understand it though, but I never cease to be amazed at that gap

sounds effective

is that person going to start with ASM language?

the one with the swiss cheese concern

Yeah, after building our dinky little CPU (using http://www.nand2tetris.org/ book), she simulated the control unit, so she turned assembly statements into machine language, then she fed it to the ALU (if it was an ALU thing)...

And since it gets boring having long trips to RAM, she figured out little ways to save time, like post-it notes (caches).

(That is, she played the role of the control unit.)

Then she could hire people, which I guess is like pipelining or optimism or something.

Ah, misread your question. We've moved up past ASM now.

(We didn't do that much with ASM.)

After networking, we'll do paradigms. Then hopefully something like Clojure, or whatever language she's interested in using.

BTW, ASM notations are kinda horrible. We played a bit with different notations. One was EDN. That seemed to work, even though I expected it to be confusing.

And BTW, she knows way more about this low-level stuff than I did before the classes. Teaching really boosted me as a programmer. Like, I'm incomparably better now. (Not that I'm necessarily particularly good, just better. ) It's like, I was such a superficial programmer who didn't understand my own mind's resources.

placeboza: thanks : i hadn't seen that before... would love to see something about what other aspects of life the inability to form consistent models does/doesn't affect, and whether the inability observed relates only to models of syntax or spreads wider too, to models of the physical world

cool @tjg . Nothing like teaching someone to improve yourself, eh?

Yeah!

mccraigmccraig: Yup that also crossed my mind yesterday when I read Chris Grangers post about comprehension/composition vs coding (about other fields that require the skill of modelling things in your mind)

@tjg Very cool that you're succeeding at teaching people this stuff, when they probably wouldn't have succeeded in a traditional course

It does require someone who is tenacious about taking it all the way

both teacher and student

are there colleges teaching in clojure that anyone knows about? Other interesting functional languages?

Specifically ones that teach many of of them, or some in depth/

There was a professor who wanted to test out teaching intro CS in clojure. University of MN Morris, I think.

Don't remember her name.

Elena Machkasova

@elenam_clj

Uh, I only took this on Coursera, but Dan Grossman from the University of Washington teaches a Programming Languages class that does SML, Racket, and Ruby with a functional bent. Idk how representative of the rest of their curriculum that is, or if the actual PLT classes they have there use the same langs...

@mj_langford:

I know penn has a longstanding haskell one

I don't know about any courses in Clojure, but I can recommend Dan Grossman course on Coursera. Ruby part isn't that interesting (at least it wasn't to me). SML and Racket parts are pretty good. There is also Eric Meier's course, that teaches FP with Haskell https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-functional-programming-delftx-fp101x

I’m asking because a sibling is intrested in going to universities with relevant programs, and is looking to transfer now

I’ll check out him for real world stuff

UT has a haskell class

That’s the one in Austin?

Do they have more than just 1?

Nope. Prof cook does Haskell for his Pl theory class and that's all the fp we have afaik

+1 for the Coursera FP course by Dan Grossman.

The SML and Racket portions are great to learn FP concepts. Agree 100% with @iref regarding the Ruby part. Luckily, that part was last

I mean, the Ruby part sorta tied some stuff together. I think the Racket portion of the course is what really shines (and is why I'm doing Clojure today), but the Ruby stuff was illustrative...I think maybe it just shouldn't have been the last language he did?

And, like, for a programmer coming into the industry...like, they're probably not gonna have an FP job so understanding how to apply FP principles in more imperative languages is maybe helpful? I dunno.

Maybe. It’s all subjective, of course. For me, I just wanted to learn FP concepts and work in FP. So the ML and Racket portions really held my interest.

I struggled with the Ruby because it just wasnt’ something that I was interested in.

I know a lot of places do the “scheme/scip as class 1” trick

Yeah, it all depends on person previous experience and expectations. Also I think prof. Grossman assume that most people know Java/C++ or other OO language, so he didn't introduce that many new concepts and as @mystery said, he mostly used to show some advantages/disadvantages of OOP vs FP.

Also writing your own interpreter of small arithmetic language in Racket was super fun. I finally got some details behind closures.

@placeboza: Actually it's me who wouldn't have succeeded in a traditional course. For example, I would've dropped Cornell CS 2110: https://gist.github.com/tjg/e3f053b1522e5b4c0c85 [Warning: probably boring read.] The people I tutor were excluded... for more/less the same reason why we have the Clojurians Slack Code of Conduct.

hi @annapawlicka!

👋

@annapawlicka: would a meta channel for talking about culture stuff be off color?

@arrdem: what do you mean by culture stuff?

I’m already slightly concerned about the proliferation of specialty channels. I’m curious, for example, as to why we have an #C03RZGPG3 and #C03RZGPG1. Seems they serve the same purpose really.

hey @staypufd

We already have a number of channels popping up covering specific libraries which I think are causing a famine of chatter in #C03S1KBA2 itself.

@annapawlicka: in this particular instance I’m just fishing for a less hostile environment than twitter to try and get other peoples opinions on the strangeloop/urbit drama. maybe just not worth it to talk about due to being contentious (apparently). idk.

Hey @arrdem

marred what happened with SL?

can’t talk standup. brb.

Sure

If folks want to discuss the strangeloop/urbit "drama", I strongly suggest it be done either in a private group with just those parties who are interested in it or in a specific channel that has no @logbot in it.

I honestly don’t think it needs to be discussed at all in any of the Clojure slack channels.

it’s not relevant to Clojure.

That would be my preference too. It’s just not relevant to Clojure.

Copy that.

I’m having a hard time imagining anything good coming from this conversation anyway. Apologies for bringing it up.

I will never, ever forgive you, @arrdem. [crosses arms; looks severe]