Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

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Teach Yourself Programming in Ten

Years
Why is everyone in such a rush?
Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java
in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL,
Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon
advanced search for [title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and
found 512 such books. Of the top ten, nine are programming books
(the other is about bookkeeping). Similar results come from
replacing "teach yourself" with "learn" or "hours" with "days."
The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about
programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to
learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in
their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad
programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are
dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take.
Let's analyze what a title like Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours could
mean:
Teach Yourself: In 24 hours you won't have time to write
several significant programs, and learn from your successes
and failures with them. You won't have time to work with an

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experienced programmer and understand what it is like to live in

a C++ environment. In short, you won't have time to learn much.
So the book can only be talking about a superficial familiarity,
not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little
learning is a dangerous thing.
C++: In 24 hours you might be able to learn some of the syntax
of C++ (if you already know another language), but you couldn't
learn much about how to use the language. In short, if you were,
say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in
the style of Basic using C++ syntax, but you couldn't learn what
C++ is actually good (and bad) for. So what's the point? Alan
Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you
think about programming, is not worth knowing". One possible
point is that you have to learn a tiny bit of C++ (or more likely,
something like JavaScript or Processing) because you need to
interface with an existing tool to accomplish a specific task. But
then you're not learning how to program; you're learning to
accomplish that task.
in 24 Hours: Unfortunately, this is not enough, as the next
section shows.

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
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topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again

and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond
your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and
after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat
again. 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.
Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the idea, although he
concentrates on 10,000 hours, not 10 years. Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004) had another metric: "Your first 10,000 photographs are
your worst." (He didn't anticipate that with digital cameras, some
people can reach that mark in a week.) True expertise may take a
lifetime: Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said "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." Of course, no
single number can be the final answer: it doesn't seem reasonable
to assume that all skills (e.g., programming, chess playing,
checkers playing, and music playing) could all require exactly the

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same amount of time to master, nor that all people will take exactly
the same amount of time. As Prof. K. Anders Ericsson puts it, "In
most domains it's remarkable how much time even the most
talented individuals need in order to reach the highest levels of
performance. The 10,000 hour number just gives you a sense that
we're talking years of 10 to 20 hours a week which those who some
people would argue are the most innately talented individuals still
need to get to the highest level."

So You Want to be a Programmer

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 your ten years/10,000 hours.
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.

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Talk with other programmers; read other programs. This is

more important than any book or training course.
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 your own or 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. Understand 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 them after you.

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Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include

one language that emphasizes class abstractions (like Java or
C++), one that emphasizes functional abstraction (like Lisp or
ML or Haskell), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like
Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or
C++ templates), and one that emphasizes parallelism (like
Clojure or Go).
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

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be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of

pages written by experts.
Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part
plan for finding great software designers:
1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.
2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of
the prospect and carefully keep a career file.
3. 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". Perlis is saying that the
greats have some internal quality that transcends their training. But
where does the quality come from? Is it innate? Or do they develop
it through diligence? As Auguste Gusteau (the fictional chef in
Ratatouille) puts it, "anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be
great." I think of it more as willingness to devote a large portion of
one's life to deliberative practice. But maybe fearless is a way to
summarize that. Or, as Gusteau's critic, Anton Ego, says: "Not
everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come
from anywhere."
So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you'll
probably get some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or

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your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days.

How about working hard to continually improve over 24 months?
Well, now you're starting to get somewhere...

References
Bloom, Benjamin (ed.) Developing Talent in Young People,
Ballantine, 1985.
Brooks, Fred, No Silver Bullets, IEEE Computer, vol. 20, no. 4,
1987, p. 10-19.
Bryan, W.L. & Harter, N. "Studies on the telegraphic language: The
acquisition of a hierarchy of habits. Psychology Review, 1899, 8,
345-375
Hayes, John R., Complete Problem Solver Lawrence Erlbaum,
1989.
Chase, William G. & Simon, Herbert A. "Perception in Chess"
Cognitive Psychology, 1973, 4, 55-81.
Lave, Jean, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture
in Everyday Life, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Answers
Approximate timing for various operations on a typical PC:

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execute typical instruction

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1/1,000,000,000 sec = 1 nanosec

fetch from L1 cache memory

0.5 nanosec

branch misprediction

5 nanosec

fetch from L2 cache memory

7 nanosec

Mutex lock/unlock

25 nanosec

fetch from main memory

100 nanosec

send 2K bytes over 1Gbps

20,000 nanosec

network
read 1MB sequentially from

250,000 nanosec

memory
fetch from new disk location

8,000,000 nanosec

(seek)
read 1MB sequentially from

20,000,000 nanosec

disk
send packet US to Europe

150 milliseconds = 150,000,000

and back

nanosec

Appendix: Language Choice

Several people have asked what programming language they
should learn first. There is no one answer, but consider these
points:
Use your friends. When asked "what operating system should I
use, Windows, Unix, or Mac?", my answer is usually: "use
whatever your friends use." The advantage you get from
learning from your friends will offset any intrinsic difference
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between OS, or between programming languages. Also

consider your future friends: the community of programmers that
you will be a part of if you continue. Does your chosen language
have a large growing community or a small dying one? Are
there books, web sites, and online forums to get answers from?
Do you like the people in those forums?
Keep it simple. Programming languages such as C++ and Java
are designed for professional development by large teams of
experienced programmers who are concerned about the
run-time efficiency of their code. As a result, these languages
have complicated parts designed for these circumstances.
You're concerned with learning to program. You don't need that
complication. You want a language that was designed to be
easy to learn and remember by a single new programmer.
Play. Which way would you rather learn to play the piano: the
normal, interactive way, in which you hear each note as soon as
you hit a key, or "batch" mode, in which you only hear the notes
after you finish a whole song? Clearly, interactive mode makes
learning easier for the piano, and also for programming. Insist
on a language with an interactive mode and use it.
Given these criteria, my recommendations for a first programming
language would be Python or Scheme. Another choice is
Javascript, not because it is perfectly well-designed for beginners,
but because there are so many online tutorials for it, such as Khan
Academy's tutorial. But your circumstances may vary, and there are
other good choices. If your age is a single-digit, you might prefer

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Alice or Squeak or Blockly (older learners might also enjoy these).

The important thing is that you choose and get started.

Appendix: Books and Other Resources

Several people have asked what books and web pages they should
learn from. I repeat that "book learning alone won't be enough" but I
can recommend the following:
Scheme: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
(Abelson & Sussman) is probably the best introduction to
computer science, and it does teach programming as a way of
understanding the computer science. You can see online videos
of lectures on this book, as well as the complete text online. The
book is challenging and will weed out some people who perhaps
could be successful with another approach.
Scheme: How to Design Programs (Felleisen et al.) is one of
the best books on how to actually design programs in an
elegant and functional way.
Python: Python Programming: An Intro to CS (Zelle) is a good
introduction using Python.
Python: Several online tutorials are available at Python.org.
Oz: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer
Programming (Van Roy & Haridi) is seen by some as the
modern-day successor to Abelson & Sussman. It is a tour
through the big ideas of programming, covering a wider range
than Abelson & Sussman while being perhaps easier to read
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and follow. It uses a language, Oz, that is not widely known but
serves as a basis for learning other languages. <

Notes
T. Capey points out that the Complete Problem Solver page on
Amazon now has the "Teach Yourself Bengali in 21 days" and
"Teach Yourself Grammar and Style" books under the "Customers
who shopped for this item also shopped for these items" section. I
guess that a large portion of the people who look at that book are
coming from this page. Thanks to Ross Cohen for help with
Hippocrates.

Translations
Thanks to the following authors, translations of this page are
available in:
Arabic
(Mohamed A. Yahya)

Bulgarian
(Boyko Bantchev)

Chinese
(Xiaogang Guo)

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Croatian
(Tvrtko Bedekovic)

Esperanto
(Federico Gobbo)

French
(Etienne Beauchesne)

German
(Stefan Ram)

Hebrew
(Eric McCain)

Hindi
(Vikash Tiwari)

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Hungarian
(Marton Mestyan)

Indonesian
(Tridjito Santoso)

Italian
(Fabio Z. Tessitore)

Japanese
(yomoyomo)

Korean (John Hwang)

Persian
(Mehdi Asgari)

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Polish
(Kuba Nowak)

Portuguese
(Augusto Radtke)

Romanian
(tefan Lazr)

Russian
(Konstantin Ptitsyn)

Serbian
(Lazar Kovacevic)

Spanish
(Carlos Rueda)

Slovak
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(Jan Waclawek)

Turkish
(al Uluahin)

Ukranian
(Oleksii Molchanovskyi)

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