Comment by throw10920
14 days ago
> Teaching how code works is more important than teaching how to code.
People learn by doing. There's a reason that "do the textbook problems" is somewhat of a meme in the math and science fields - because that's the way that you learn those things.
I've met someone who said that when he get a textbook, he starts by only doing the problems, and skipping the chapter content entirely. Only when he has significant trouble with the problems (i.e. he's stuck on a single one for several hours) does he read the chapter text.
He's one of the smartest people I know.
This is because you learn by doing the problems. In the software field, that means coding.
Telling yourself that you could code up a solution is very different than actually being able to write the code.
And writing the code is how you build fluency and understanding as to how computers actually work.
> I never did any meaningful amount of assembler programming. It was mostly no longer a relevant skill by the time I studied computer science (94-99). I built an interpreter for an imaginary CPU at some point using a functional programming language in my second year.
Same thing for assembly. Note that you built an interpreter for an imaginary CPU - not a real one, as that would have been a much harder challenge given that you didn't do any meaningful amount of assembly program and didn't understand low-level computer hardware very well.
Obviously, this isn't to say that information about how a system works can't be learned without practice - just that that's substantially harder and takes much more time (probably 3-10x), and I can guarantee you that those doing vibecoding are not putting in that extra time.
I agree with you in part, you can’t expect to learn something like coding without the doing.
The brave new world is that you no longer have to do “coding” in our sense of the word. The doing, and what exercises you should learn with have both changed.
Now students should build whole systems, not worry about simple Boolean logic and program flow. The last programmer to ever need to write an if statement may already be in studies.
> The brave new world is that you no longer have to do “coding” in our sense of the word.
Notice how I also talked about coding being a way that you learn how computers work.
If you don't code, you have a very hard time understanding how computers work.
And while there's some evidence that programmers may not need write all of their code by hand, there's zero evidence that either they don't need to learn how to code at all (as you're claiming), or that they don't need to even know how computers work (which is a step further).
There's tons of anecdotes from senior software engineers on Hacker News (and elsewhere) about coding agents writing bad code that they need to debug and fix by hand. I've literally never seen a single story about how a coding agent built a nontrivial program by itself without the prompter looking at the code.