back

by zorked·2y ago·view on hn ↗
> Teaching to _think_ is just as important as teaching to code, but this is seldom done

Oh, the arrogance of thinking that the other person doesn't think.

2 comments
I don't think there's any arrogance in the statement. It doesn't assume others don't think. It's simply observing that most blog posts and how-to articles show the final result, but not necessarily the steps that were needed to get there.
I don't see what one has to do with the other.
I'm not really sure I understand what you're saying and/or asking.

As far as I can tell, the statement in question was simply saying that showing the steps to come to a solution is rare, and also that it helps to teach how to think (how to solve a problem). I guess don't see where the arrogance lies.

It isn't what author argues at all. It's about teaching how to think: that you have to do some research and it's not a step you can skip; having done your research doesn't free you from having to draw your own conclusions too. Skipping either of those steps is easy but wrong.
> is seldom done

It's this part

Perhaps the wording was off on my part. What I meant is not that people don't think, it's that people seldom teach others to think, at least in web articles.

Most posts of such format I have seen are "we did this and got this", not "we tried this, it failed because of this, then we figured out something else might work and it worked after these modifications".

> Most posts of such format I have seen are "we did this and got this", not "we tried this, it failed because of this, then we figured out something else might work and it worked after these modifications".

That doesn't resemble anything remotely related to teaching how to think. You're just logging your trial and error process, which is exactly what each and every single developer goes through on a daily basis.

What exactly do you think other developers do?

In context they're very clearly talking about blogging/write-ups/presentation of technical things. A lot of the material about making / fixing things we're presented with in life are finished products, the results clean and tidy, and the steps to accomplish the result obvious with the benefit of someone else to tell you what they are. It's much less common to see even a glimpse of the effort it took to get there, or for someone to document the process, including dead ends and false starts.

Even here, we can imagine that had the author failed to actually make anything faster, they might not have written anything at all. And yet, wouldn't that still have had benefit to people? To see things attempted that didn't work, to understand why those things didn't work? Maybe it wouldn't have been as interesting to as wide an audience, but it's important to see failure. Both as a way of learning from others to not repeat the same efforts, but also because its really easy to fall into the trap of assuming you're incapable if you do fail when everyone around you always seems to be succeeding.

Or perhaps as an analogy, almost everyone creates some art in life, and certainly every artist struggles to create that art. Yet it would be a disservice to only ever present art to learning artists as complete master works and paint by numbers replications. We need to see the "happy little accidents" of Bob Ross, the sketch books of iterations on a design, the piles of failed clay firings. Not because no one experiences these things, but because they are instructive on their own in a way that only seeing success is not.

Again, they aren't saying developers don't think. They're talking about blogging

I had this issue at PeerDB where we'd blog about some dev, when I wrote it'd be a stream of consciousness trying to communicate the mood, frustration, & flailing process. It wouldn't get published, in favor of blogs with clearer product messaging