Teach yourself programing in ten years.
发布时间:2009-9-17 19:53
发布者:linux_Ultra
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten YearsPeter NorvigWhy is everyone in such a rush?Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Javain 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach VisualBasic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours. I didthe following power search at Amazon.com: pubdate: after 1992 and title: days and (title: learn or title: teach yourself)and got back 248 hits. The first 78 were computer books (number 79was LearnBengali in 30 days). I replaced "days" with "hours"and got remarkably similar results: 253 more books, with 77 computerbooks followed by TeachYourself Grammar and Style in 24 Hours at number 78. Out ofthe top 200 total, 96% were computer books. The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learnabout computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier tolearn than anything else. There are no books on how to learnBeethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few days.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. Let's analyze what a title like Learn C++ in Three Dayscould mean:
Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the sametime - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyonepractised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours aweek. But around the age of eight real differences started toemerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class beganto practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine,eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the ageof 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practiceover the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled,by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over4,000 hours.So it may be that 10,000 hours, not 10 years, is the magic number.Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought ittook longer: "Excellence in any department can beattained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased ata lesser price." And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained "the lyf so short, the craftso long to lerne." Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa,vita brevis", which is part of the longer quotation "Ars longa, vitabrevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudiciumdifficile", which in English renders as "Life is short, [the] craftlong, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgmentdifficult." Although in Latin, ars can mean either art orcraft, in the original Greek the word "techne" can only mean "skill", not "art". |
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