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Developer Bootcamps - Be a Programmer in Two Months!

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday October 15 2014, @03:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the considered-harmful dept.

Thexalon writes:

The New York Times has coverage on the phenomenon of Developer Bootcamps, that claim to do in a matter of a couple of months what used to take at least a couple of years for an associate's degree. These cram courses are apparently getting about a 75% job placement rate.

Have any Soylentils either gone through these programs, or worked with others who have? If so, what are your experiences?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by strattitarius on Wednesday October 15 2014, @08:02PM

    by strattitarius (3191) on Wednesday October 15 2014, @08:02PM (#106377) Journal

    This person is an English major. I've often thought that those who fail at human language are doomed to fail at computer language.

    I, disagree completely, because the English language, a kludge it is. Perhaps being able, and knowing when, to ignore errors, in language, that is, is more an indication, at least in my opinion, of programming ability.

    But seriously, I am not sure that is necessarily true. English is a kludge. It has so many exceptions that making rules is useless (i before e for example). Not to mention doing well in English means using and/or identifying personification, foreshadowing, and those type of things. I apparently suck at story telling, so I wasn't the best in English classes.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by strattitarius on Wednesday October 15 2014, @08:32PM

    by strattitarius (3191) on Wednesday October 15 2014, @08:32PM (#106388) Journal
    To add to my comment, I completely suck at spelling. If not for spell check, people would probably assume I was completely uneducated, and perhaps half retarded. But again that is because there is little logic to how things are spelled (some at least). conchense? conchence? conchance? Conscience? Really?
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    • (Score: 1) by khedoros on Wednesday October 15 2014, @09:39PM

      by khedoros (2921) on Wednesday October 15 2014, @09:39PM (#106415)
      I think the other commenter's use of "English" as an example might have caused you to miss the point.

      This person is a [language] major. I've often thought that those who fail at human language are doomed to fail at computer language. Failure to understand the parts of speech, syntax, etymology, and such predicts a failure to appreciate the punctuation in computer languages and why misplacing a comma or using a comma where a semicolon would be appropriate—a common mistake in grammar—will cause compilation to blow up.

      The point is that every language has a structure, and an appreciation for that structure, and for the history of the language, bodes well for the ability to understand other languages.

      As an example, in Lisp, "car" and "cdr" don't make logical sense *unless* you know the history behind them, and the connection to assembly language macros on the IBM 704. One might expect those functions to be called "first" and "rest", or something similar. Similarly, the spelling of "conscience" only makes sense when you look at its history, with its construction in Latin via translation from a Greek phrase, its inclusion in French, and the interactions between France and England that allowed its entry into English.

      The point is: programming languages are collections of arbitrary rules of grammar and vocabulary, which must be strictly adhered to to communicate your intentions to a computer. Humans have a heuristics and probability-based "compiler" for understanding language, but we aren't so lucky with computers (since no one has figured out how to program human intuition into one). A person who knows how to communicate clearly by following and understanding established conventions in human language will be well-equipped to do the same thing with machine language, including handling all the arbitrary crap that a lot of languages have. You want inconsistent and arbitrary? Try Perl. Or Javascript. They'll give English a run for its money.

      • (Score: 2) by strattitarius on Thursday October 16 2014, @01:54AM

        by strattitarius (3191) on Thursday October 16 2014, @01:54AM (#106500) Journal
        That is interesting. But by that standard, wouldn't you expect those that do well with foreign languages would do really well with programming? Or vice-versa? But I have never noticed a very strong correlation between those two. It certainly doesn't exist for me.

        What's your take on ability/proficiency of learning foreign languages and programming?
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        • (Score: 1) by khedoros on Thursday October 16 2014, @03:08AM

          by khedoros (2921) on Thursday October 16 2014, @03:08AM (#106516)
          My take is that someone with an aptitude for understanding the structure of language (whether foreign or not) would be more likely to also have an aptitude for programming. That doesn't mean that this theoretical person would have an interest in both pursuits, and I think that that's an important part of what makes someone successful at something. Either here or on the green site, there was a recent article about how curiosity aids learning. So often, programming is considered in its relation to math, and languages are considered in their relations to softer studies. I'd posit that the lack of correlation between aptitude that you've observed is more due to social factors than to a lack of a relationship between them.

  • (Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 15 2014, @10:12PM

    by Fnord666 (652) on Wednesday October 15 2014, @10:12PM (#106438) Homepage

    But seriously, I am not sure that is necessarily true. English is a kludge. It has so many exceptions that making rules is useless (i before e for example). Not to mention doing well in English means using and/or identifying personification, foreshadowing, and those type of things. I apparently suck at story telling, so I wasn't the best in English classes.

    So you're saying that people who understand English well should also be well suited to picking up Perl?

    • (Score: 2) by velex on Thursday October 16 2014, @12:24AM

      by velex (2068) on Thursday October 16 2014, @12:24AM (#106472) Journal

      Haha, who knows?

      I used a subset of Ruby to teach primary concepts (we did not get into the lambda-specific kind of iteration in Ruby and instead used very non-Ruby-ish iteration by incrementation) and warned her that should she have a problem and decide a regular expression would be the solution, then she'd have two problems!

      But then my own documentation is filled with regular expressions to input to Vim to massage data files… lol