Natural Born Programmers
There is a prevalent myth that some people are “natural born programmers” to whom programming comes easily. This is a dangerous idea, as in accepting it, you are also accepting anyone who struggles learning programming is not meant to be a programmer.
This idea is especially dangerous idea for a teacher, as accepting it will cause bias in how you interact with your students. Research has consistently shown that this kind of unconscious bias on part of teachers subtly but effectively influences students’ interest and effort in learning computer science. We’ll explore this and related issues more in a later chapter.
The truth is that in learning to program, we are learning to solve problems in a way that can be performed by a computing machine. As we discussed in the previous chapter, this must be expressed in a programming language that has a limited and specific set of operations it can carry out. It has no ability to interpret our intent - only the ability to carry out instructions exactly as written and only if these are written in a language it knows.
As a way of exploring these limitations, see how giving instructions to a “computational agent” goes for the Darnit family:
The point of this exercise is to understand the exactitude or precision with which programs must be written. But it also reveals just how different people are from computers. The simple truth is that to become good programmers, we must learn to write programs by developing an understanding of how the computers work, as well as how to express instructions in a form they can use.
The rest of this chapter is devoted to understanding that learning process.