Tag Archives: code

Learnable Programming:

a well-designed sys­tem is not sim­ply a bag of fea­tures. A good sys­tem is designed to encour­age par­tic­u­lar ways of think­ing, with all fea­tures care­fully and cohe­sively designed around that purpose.

This essay will present many fea­tures! The trick is to see through them — to see the under­ly­ing design prin­ci­ples that they rep­re­sent, and under­stand how these prin­ci­ples enable the pro­gram­mer to think.

So why did you make this?

Because I’m a pro­gram­mer, and this is what I do.

Some peo­ple jog away from their house every day, only to jog back. Others walk on a tread­mill, expend­ing energy to get nowhere. In both cases, it may appear to oth­ers that they’ve accom­plished noth­ing, but they’ve cho­sen to do these seem­ingly redun­dant activ­i­ties on a reg­u­lar basis to incre­men­tally improve them­selves. And it works.

Marco Arment — sec­ond­crack on GitHub.

There was a time when nobody knew how to write lit­er­ary prose. The geniuses who invented it shared their spe­cial tool with a few friends, and they rel­ished in their pri­vate, elite com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Eventually monks, politi­cians, and aca­d­e­mics joined the club. Now, we judge a society’s over­all level of intel­lec­tual advance­ment by the lit­er­acy rate: the per­cent­age of peo­ple who have learned to read and write.

…

Long ago, it would have been ridicu­lous to assume a whole soci­ety could be judged by its abil­ity to read and write prose. It feels ridicu­lous now, to assume that we might use com­puter pro­gram­ming as a sim­i­lar bench­mark. Yet it may happen.

Daniel Jalkut - Learn To Code.