The foundations of the foundations.

[SkyDream 315]

Does anyone ever feel like when someone explains something to you for the first time or when you take a course in school about something you believe would be challenging but conquerable, and when they start to explain it you honestly feel as if they skipped a few steps and went straight to the stuff that you already should have learned a firm, solid foundation for?

 

When I took a Java / C++ course in High School (Not sure why they bunched them up) the teacher, who was primarily a math teacher, skipped any sort of teaching of the conceptual framework and went straight to the "hello world" example, and then immediately went onto harder challenges.

 

Forgive me if I appear to be undersimplifying things, but does anyone else feel like you absolutely can't go straight to hello world? ... like you can't just show someone code and hope that they just understand why some words are used and some aren't, and why this has this spacing and why punctuation is here and not there?

 

I haven't read every single actual book on coding to see if this is a universal dilemma or not, but just about anyone I've ever asked about programming seemed to have no awareness that they're skipping steps A, B, C, and D, and then went on to the rest of the alphabet as if it was the most basic thing imaginable.

 

It's like if a math teacher couldn't understand the concept of a young student not knowing how a variable works. It's like, you can SEE the "x" next to the number 2, but you can't understand why the letter "x" can't represent only one number, because every other thing you've seen until then has only been one thing.

 

That's the fun part about programming. When you're new, anything can be anything.

 

And it is terrifying.

[Jeric 46,860]

There is a degree of expectation that anyone who takes a programming language course already knows the fundamentals. I attribute it to the sheer number of hobbyists who taught themselves. This makes such courses less accessible to the uninitiated.

 

Every course I took in college .... every last one ... followed that assumption. I felt bad for a few of my fellow students.

 

I quite love this topic. Any other developers (or those that desire to be one) feel free to chime in.

[I used to be a stranger 7,994]

How foundational really depends upon the level of quality expected at the end. If you're in a master class for Digital sculpting, they're going to assume you already know what Photoshop, Zbrush and Mudbox are, and know how to use them.

[SkyDream 315]

Of course. I can certainly understand such a requirement.

 

This topic aims to refer to the very base foundation though. It would be natural to assume that a computer science course student must be aware of what RAM is when they say a variable is stored in memory, but it would be presumptive to assume a student already knows what a variable or a pointer is when putting forth an example.