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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: 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.