I preface this comment by mentioning that I come from a similar background as the author. Although I played with Logo and QBasic in elementary school, the first language I really learned was C. Likewise, my car in high school was a stick shift. The author makes some mistakes about transmissions (overdrive does not do what he thinks), but I'll ignore them since I want to focus on programming.
While C and manual transmissions are fun and rewarding for enthusiasts, I don't think teaching them first would benefit the programming and driving communities.
Learning to program is difficult and frustrating. Learning C first, more-so. I should know. I took data structures (taught in C) when I was 13. I'd been working on a homework assignment for a couple of days, and couldn't get it to behave as desired. I'd inspected every line of code countless times. I'd saturated the code with printf()s, but I still couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. It was as if a condition was always true when it shouldn't be. I was almost in tears when I asked my dad for help. He immediately saw an if statement with an = instead of a ==. Back then, gcc didn't default to warning about assignment in conditions. I was angry at having such a small error cause me so much grief. After having that experience, any reasonable person would say, "This is crazy. I'm going to do something else with my life." Many of my classmates did say that. About 50% of students failed. I imagine more would have persisted if the language was Python.
It's a similar story for learning to drive stick, though the stakes are higher. Learning to drive is difficult and dangerous. Adding the complication of shifting makes it even more difficult and dangerous. In my first week, I managed to roll backwards into another car at a stoplight. I had some very close calls due to my mind being occupied by shifting. In hindsight, I'm lucky nobody was injured due to my inexperience.
Teaching C and manual transmissions first will likely get you better programmers and drivers, but you will have significantly fewer of both. The author implicitly makes this trade-off by not recommending that everyone first learn to use assembly and motorcycles. After all, both are more difficult than (and will teach you skills that are useful for) everyday programming/driving.
> I was angry at having such a small error cause me so much grief. After having that experience, any reasonable person would say, "This is crazy. I'm going to do something else with my life." Many of my classmates did say that.
But when does this grief stop?
A few months back I had the task of implementing the receiving end of what was basically a single-sign-on scheme. I had to use SAML. If you don't know that that is, consider yourself lucky -- or, just google "I hate SAML." That was one of the early hits I found when I first began researching the subject.
In the end, the implementation wasn't all that difficult. But the documentation was another story. The overview documents were buzzword bingo; the spec was an exercise in tedium; the libraries were poorly documented; the mailing lists were horrible. The complaining of people on the Internet about all this was demoralizing. When I finally figured it out and got it working, I felt like the payoff was poor compensation. It was just too much frustration for what I accomplished.
Programming has its share of this kind of frustration. (So does systems administration.) Just taking your average manpage as an example, we work in an industry where people have no capacity to explain anything to someone who doesn't already understand. A programmer needs inquisitiveness, yes; but that inquisitiveness needs to be steeled by an unreasonable amount of grit.
If programming were full of nothing but the fun of for-loops, it would be for everyone. As it is though, I perfectly understand why many otherwise smart and capable people choose to do something else.
I love Python; but maybe using it as an introductory language -- in college, no less -- is a little bit like luring children with candy.
It doesn't, but we get used to it. I take the same view as Douglas Crockford:
I think there has to be something seriously wrong with you in order to do this work. A normal person, once they’ve looked into the abyss, will say, “I’m done. This is stupid. I’m going to do something else.” But not us, ‘cause there’s something really wrong with us.[1]
I'm pretty sure this "brokenness" can be trained, but tossing someone in the deep end is not the way to do it.
While C and manual transmissions are fun and rewarding for enthusiasts, I don't think teaching them first would benefit the programming and driving communities.
Learning to program is difficult and frustrating. Learning C first, more-so. I should know. I took data structures (taught in C) when I was 13. I'd been working on a homework assignment for a couple of days, and couldn't get it to behave as desired. I'd inspected every line of code countless times. I'd saturated the code with printf()s, but I still couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. It was as if a condition was always true when it shouldn't be. I was almost in tears when I asked my dad for help. He immediately saw an if statement with an = instead of a ==. Back then, gcc didn't default to warning about assignment in conditions. I was angry at having such a small error cause me so much grief. After having that experience, any reasonable person would say, "This is crazy. I'm going to do something else with my life." Many of my classmates did say that. About 50% of students failed. I imagine more would have persisted if the language was Python.
It's a similar story for learning to drive stick, though the stakes are higher. Learning to drive is difficult and dangerous. Adding the complication of shifting makes it even more difficult and dangerous. In my first week, I managed to roll backwards into another car at a stoplight. I had some very close calls due to my mind being occupied by shifting. In hindsight, I'm lucky nobody was injured due to my inexperience.
Teaching C and manual transmissions first will likely get you better programmers and drivers, but you will have significantly fewer of both. The author implicitly makes this trade-off by not recommending that everyone first learn to use assembly and motorcycles. After all, both are more difficult than (and will teach you skills that are useful for) everyday programming/driving.