All entries for Wednesday 02 March 2022

Learning to Program

We (Warwick RSE) love quotes, and we love analogies. We do always caution against letting your analogies leak, by supposing properties of the model will necessarily apply to reality, but nontheless, a carefully chosen story can illustrate a concept like nothing else. This post discusses some of my favorite analogies for the process of learning to program - which lasts one's entire programming life, by the way. We're never done learning.

Jigsaw Puzzles

Learning to program is a lot like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box. At first, you have a blank table and a heap of pieces. Perhaps some of the pieces have snippets you can understand already - writing perhaps, or small pictures. You know what these depict, but not where they might fit overall. You start by gathering pieces that somehow fit together - edges perhaps, or writing, or small amounts of distinctive colours. You build up little blocks (build understanding of isolated concepts) and start to fit them together. As the picture builds up, new pieces fit in far more easily - you use the existing picture to help you understand what they mean. Of course, the programming puzzle is never finished, which is where this analogy starts to leak.

I particularly like this one for two reasons. Firstly, one really does tend to build little isolated mini-pictures, and move them around the table until they start to connect together, both in jigsaws and in programming. Secondly, occasionally, you have these little moments - a piece that seemed to be just some weird lines fits into place and you say "oh is THAT what that is!". One gets the same thing when programming - "oh, is that how that works!" or "is that what that means".

Personally, a lot of these moments then become "Why didn't anybody SAY that!". This was the motivation behind our blog series of "Well I Never Knew That" - all those little things that make so much sense once you know.

The other motivation for the WINKT series is better illustrated using a different analogy - hence why we like to have plenty on hand.

A Walk in the Woods

Another way to look at the learning process, is as a process of exploring some new terrain, building your mental map of it. At first, you mostly stick to obvious paths, slowly venturing further and further. You find landmarks and add them to your map. Some paths turn out to link up to other paths, and you start to assemble a true connected picture of how things fit together. Yet still there is terrain just off the paths you haven't gone into. There could be anything out there, just outside your view. Even as you venture further and deeper into the woods, you must also make sure to look around you, and truly understand the areas you've already walked through, and how they connect together.

My badly done keynote picture is below. The paths are thin lines, the red fuzzy marks show those we have explored and the grey shading shows the areas we've actually been into and now "understand". Eventually we notice that the two paths in the middle are joined - a nice "Aha" moment of clarity ensues. But much of our map remains a mystery.

And that is one of the reasons I really like this analogy - all of the things you still don't know - all that unexplored terrain. This too is very like the learning process - you are able to use things once you have walked their paths, even though there may be details about them you don't understand. On the one hand, this is very powerful. On the other, it can lead to "magic incantations" - things you can repeat without actually understanding. This is inevitable in a task this complex, but it is important to go back and understand eventually. Don't let your map get too thin and don't always stick to the paths, or when you do step off them, you'll be lost.

This was the other main motivation behind our WINKT series - the moments when things you do without thinking suddenly make sense, and a new chunk of terrain gets filled in. Like approaching the same bit of terrain from a new angle, or discovering that two paths join, you gain a new perspective, and ideally, this new perspective is simpler than before. Rather than two paths, you see there is only one. Rather than two mysterious houses deep in the woods, you see there is one, seen from two angles.

Take Away Point

If you take one thing away from this post, make it this: the more you work on fitting the puzzle pieces together, the clearer things become. Rather than brown and green and blue and a pile of mysterious shapes, eventually you just have a horse.

And one final thing, if we may stretch the jigsaw analogy a little further: just because a piece seems to fit, doesn't mean it's always the right piece...

Heather Ratcliffe : 02 Mar 2022 12:52 |  Tags: Code Philosophy Programming Winkt |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem