On Sun, 2007-06-24 at 02:26 -0400, Peter Gutmann wrote: > Going off on a bit of a tangent, what about considering the evidence > in "The > Camel has Two Humps" > (http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf) which > argues that > programming ability shows a strong bimodal distribution and that some > people > will never learn to program/be good programmers no matter what > teaching > methods you use, while others will, no matter what teaching methods > you use. > Maybe it's not a case of "you need to understand X" but "you need to > be born > with the geek gene".
I'm responding to this message earlier in the thread, but in the context of Richard and Lindsay's later notes. The point that I was trying to make in response to the above is that we cannot claim "some people will never learn to program/be good programmers no what teaching methods you use." As Richard points out, the Camel paper test explains 23% of the variance -- that leaves 77% of the variance unexplained. Lindsay's reflections on motivation in programming vs. motivation in music, as well as Richard's observation on motivation, serve to support my claim: We know relatively little about what leads to success in programming. I whole-heartedly believe the Camel-paper claim that mental models are a significant factor, and I also believe that motivation is another significant factor. Whether motivation for professional programmers is different than that of end-user programmers is an open and interesting question, as Alessio has mentioned. Richard's story about the MS students and how motivation wasn't the critical factor in that experience is a fascinating story. The bottomline, though, is that we don't have a good explanation for who succeeded and who didn't in that story. I suggest that the jury is still out on whether some people can't learn to program. There is still a large unexplored space in explaining how and why people learn to program. Mark ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
