Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Butuh waktu sepuluh tahun untuk bisa menjadi programmer handal… wodow!!! ga kelamaan tuch bos? meneketehe, satu bulan jadi programmer aja belum, apalagi 10 tahun. Kapan ya sepuluh tahunnya?Berikut pemaparan Peter Norvig (Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years) :
Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973))
have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a
wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition,
telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and
research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real
shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more
years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre,
the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and
an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing
small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had
mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers,
was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought it took longer
than ten years: “Excellence in any department can be attained only by
the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.”
And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained “the lyf so short, the craft so long
to lerne.” Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt “ars longa,
vita brevis”, which is part of the longer quotation “Ars longa, vita
brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile”,
which in English renders as “Life is short, [the] craft long,
opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.”
Although in Latin, ars can mean either art or craft, in the original
Greek the word “techne” can only mean “skill”, not “art”.
Here’s my recipe for programming success:
- Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.
- Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.
- Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing. To put it more technically, “the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.” (p. 366) and “the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors.” (p. 20-21) The book Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is an interesting reference for this viewpoint.
- If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don’t enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won’t be enough. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter” says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker’s Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he’s produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.
- Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you’re the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you’re the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don’t like to do (because they make you do it for them).
- Work on projects after other programmers. Be involved in understanding a program written by someone else. See what it takes to understand and fix it when the original programmers are not around. Think about how to design your programs to make it easier for those who will maintain it after you.
- Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).
- Remember that there is a “computer” in “computer science”. Know how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk. (Answers here.)
- Get involved in a language standardization effort. It could be the ANSI C++ committee, or it could be deciding if your local coding style will have 2 or 4 space indentation levels. Either way, you learn about what other people like in a language, how deeply they feel so, and perhaps even a little about why they feel so.
- Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.
With all that in mind, its questionable how far you
can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read
all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice. 30 Months
later, when my second child was due, did I go back to the books for a
refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned
out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of
pages written by experts.
Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullets identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:
- Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.
- Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.
- Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.
This assumes that some people already have the
qualities necessary for being a great designer; the job is to properly
coax them along. Alan Perlis
put it more succinctly: “Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo
would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great
programmers”.
So go ahead and buy that Java book; you’ll probably
get some use out of it. But you won’t change your life, or your real
overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours, days, or even months.
ps :
* sorry pemaparannya pake bhs inggris, soalnya ga bisa menerjemahkan ke dalam bhs Indonesia, padahal kaan seorang programmer harus pandai berbahasa inggris…. masih dalam proses pembelajaran to be expert programmmer…
* sorry pemaparannya pake bhs inggris, soalnya ga bisa menerjemahkan ke dalam bhs Indonesia, padahal kaan seorang programmer harus pandai berbahasa inggris…. masih dalam proses pembelajaran to be expert programmmer…
10 November 2010 pukul 08.50
Java and to some degree .Net are the main choices because they have been consistently pegged as the “safe” choice to go with for mid-level project managers in the corporate world. No one was ever fired for choosing Java or Microsoft.
However, there are many large distributed applications these days that run primarily with technologies like Python, PHP, et al. Even companies like Google and Yahoo are heavily invested in these technologies. Java may be the main choice for enterprise development now, but it’s days are numbered as the only stalwart option to go with.
Let’s face it, many of these so called “enterprise applications” could easily have been written much faster and with less overhead using technologies like Python, PHP, et al.
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