Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

Yes, the biggest fault of those books was that the titles were a cheap gimmick. The implication that you could blow through the book in a day and know the language is kind of a lose-lose, because it undersells the difficulty of the lessons to newcomers and sounds patently ridiculous to professionals. Realistically, someone who has no prior programming experience would take more than an hour per lesson, and would probably take a month or two to get through the book, like any other first-time programming tutorial.

My first exposure to programming was Sam's Teach Yourself C++ In 24 Hours from a used bookstore in my early teens. I didn't stick with it for more than a couple chapters but compiling a program that printed "Hello world" was a magical experience.

At what point would you say that you became "good" at programming?

It seems the irony has been mostly lost. Gave me a chuckle. :)

Getting hired by Google isn't the end-goal of learning programming.

No, the book is not about rehearsing you for interviews. In contrary, the book emphasizes on the mastery of your tech which books rehearsing you for interviews neither claim nor can do.

The whole idea of the book is to get deep insight into your tech following the 10 000 hours rule which one might achieve within 10 years of practice.

It was published against the mainstream idea of that time advertised under the name "Teach Yourself Something In 24 Hours". This book is a call for hard work, mastery and is against rushing when learning.

A classic interaction from Usenet (I suspect the Reddit comparison is apt), was someone coming upon a really nasty fight between a couple of trol- er, users.

They expressed horror, and said something to the effect of “My god! I came to discuss cats!”.

Another user commented something along the lines of “You have mistaken this forum for a place to exchange information. It is not. It is a public toilet. Jump on in.”

Probably the closest modern equivalent to Usenet is Reddit--each newsgroup is roughly kind of like a subreddit, and, like Reddit, threading is quite the norm in newsgroups. The main difference is that Usenet wasn't centrally organized, messages tended to be rather longer than Reddit posts, and it's possible to cross-post on Usenet (post to multiple newsgroups with one message) in a way that it isn't on Reddit.

(The pre-web antecedent of Discord would be IRC, latterly stuff like AOL chat rooms.)

And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.

  > And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.

Usenet was a decentralized forum where anybody could participate and nobody could be banned. Despite this, the quality of discussion was usually very high. The user interfaces supported rather comprehensive threading and filtering capabilities, so you could block the people you wished you could ban. It was sort of destroyed by spam (since spammers couldn't be banned) but doesn't have much spam anymore because it's too obscure for spammers to bother with.

There isn't a Zoomer equivalent, because the internet has been locked down since then, and anyone who attempts to offer an uncensored and uncensorable forum gets brigaded and maybe swatted, then cut off from the banking system.

But Usenet still exists.

Usenet is still around and still fairly active, though by volume its probably more commonly used as the originating source for anything torrented nowadays. PHP bulletin boards is a good approximation if you squint. If you imagine being on a large number of topical mailing lists all filtered into their own inboxes you wouldn't be far off.

"Usenet" has a wikipedia page which describes the network quite well. I used it in the late 2000s, not just for discussion as some groups were also hosting warez. Pretty sure you can still go there although it's unclear you'll get the post quality of the 80s-90s (back when I read discussions it was already a lot of trolling).

Are zoomers incapable of looking things up?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

For programming-specific contexts I think StackOverflow might be the better equivalent.

The comic might have been insightful had it stopped at the third panel.

Calling Norvig's insights garbage says a lot about you. How did you ever come with that strawman?

> If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on your own or on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough

Where exactly does Norvig advocate not to have a career earlier?

Heh, no wonder you are getting downvoted. Did you actually learn anything this way? This post is about learning and not how fast you can generate code, generating with LLM's is not learning. Then when you have not learnt anything but you generate LLM code that looks great but you cannot debug it because you never learnt programming and have to rely on the LLM, you have problems. Much like the CEO who vibe coded on replit and lost his production DB.