It's Not You, It's Them: Why Programming Languages Are Hard To Teach 📺

By Xah Lee. Date:

I have a new programer hero: Zed Shaw.

It's Not You, It's Them: Why Programming Languages Are Hard To Teach presentation by Zed Shaw. from Øredev Conference PRO.

I've been teaching programming for a few years now, and I've come to realize that the harder a languages is to teach, the more poorly designed it is.

—Zed Shaw

One of the article Zed cited is: [Static vs. dynamic type systems: an empirical study about the relationship between type casts and development time By Stefan Hanenberg. At http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590n/10au/hanenberg-oopsla2010.pdf , accessed on 2014-04-15 ]

Lots of programer celebrities are idiots, or scam artists.

… what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like “Structured Analysis and Design”, “Software Engineering”, “Maturity Models”, “Management Information Systems”, “Integrated Project Support Environments” “Object Orientation” and “Business Process Re-engineering” (the latter three being known as IPSE, OO and BPR, respectively). — Edsger W Dijkstra (1930 to 2002), in EWD 1175: The strengths of the academic enterprise.

The idiotish includes: Guido (Python).

The scam artistish includes: Larry Wall (Perl), Rob Pike (unix stuff, golang), Martin Fowler (agile shit), etc.