Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Peter Norvig

Why is everyone in such a rush? Translations

Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Thanks to the following
Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, authors, translations of
Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced this page are available
search for [title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such in:
books. Of the top ten, nine are programming books (the other is about
bookkeeping). Similar results come from replacing "teach yourself" with Arabic
"learn" or "hours" with "days." (Mohamed A. Yahya)

The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about
programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to
learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their
book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is Bulgarian
easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The (Boyko Bantchev)
Abtruse Goose comic also had their take.

Let's analyze what a title like Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours could
mean:

Teach Yourself: In 24 hours you won't have time to write several Chinese
significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures (Xiaogang Guo)
with them. You won't have time to work with an experienced
programmer and understand what it is like to live in a C++
environment. In short, you won't have time to learn much. So the
book can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep
understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a Croatian
dangerous thing. (Tvrtko Bedekovic)

C++: In 24 hours you might be able to learn some of the syntax of

C++ (if you already know another language), but you couldn't
learn much about how to use the language. In short, if you were,
say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in the Esperanto
style of Basic using C++ syntax, but you couldn't learn what C++ (Federico Gobbo)
is actually good (and bad) for. So what's the point? Alan Perlis
once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about
programming, is not worth knowing". One possible point is that
you have to learn a tiny bit of C++ (or more likely, something like
JavaScript or Processing) because you need to interface with an French
existing tool to accomplish a specific task. But then you're not (Etienne Beauchesne)
learning how to program; you're learning to accomplish that task.

in 24 Hours: Unfortunately, this is not enough, as the next section

shows.
German
(Stefan Ram)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989),
Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop
expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing,
music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing,
swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The Hebrew
key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but (Eric McCain)
challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability,
trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and
correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to
be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4,
took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In Hindi
another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of (Vikash Tiwari)
#1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had
been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and
while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt.
Peppers, was released in 1967.
Hungarian
Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the idea, although he concentrates on (Marton Mestyan)
10,000 hours, not 10 years. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) had
another metric: "Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." (He
didn't anticipate that with digital cameras, some people can reach that
mark in a week.) True expertise may take a lifetime: Samuel Johnson
(1709-1784) said "Excellence in any department can be attained only by Indonesian
the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And (Tridjito Santoso)
Chaucer (1340-1400) complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to
lerne." Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa, vita
brevis", which is part of the longer quotation "Ars longa, vita brevis,
occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile", which
in English renders as "Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, Italian
experiment treacherous, judgment difficult." Of course, no single number (Fabio Z. Tessitore)
can be the final answer: it doesn't seem reasonable to assume that all
skills (e.g., programming, chess playing, checkers playing, and music
playing) could all require exactly the same amount of time to master, nor
that all people will take exactly the same amount of time. As Prof. K.
Anders Ericsson puts it, "In most domains it's remarkable how much time Japanese
even the most talented individuals need in order to reach the highest (yomoyomo)
levels of performance. The 10,000 hour number just gives you a sense
that we're talking years of 10 to 20 hours a week which those who some
people would argue are the most innately talented individuals still need to
get to the highest level."
Korean (John Hwang)
So You Want to be a Programmer
Here's my recipe for programming success:

Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Persian

Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be (Mehdi Asgari)
willing to put in your ten years/10,000 hours.

Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing. To put it

more technically, "the maximal level of performance for
individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a Polish
function of extended experience, but the level of performance can (Kuba Nowak)
be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of
deliberate efforts to improve." (p. 366) and "the most effective
learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty
level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and
opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors." (p. 20-21)
The book Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture Portuguese
in Everyday Life is an interesting reference for this viewpoint. (Augusto Radtke)
Talk with other programmers; read other programs. This is more
important than any book or training course.

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 Romanian
credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, (Ştefan Lazăr)
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. "Computer science education
cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than
studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert Russian
painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's (Konstantin Ptitsyn)
Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a
High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his
own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own
nightclub.
Serbian
Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best (Lazar Kovacevic)
programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When
you're the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and
to inspire others with your vision. When you're the worst, you learn
what the masters do, and you learn what they don't like to do
(because they make you do it for them). Spanish
(Carlos Rueda)
Work on projects after other programmers. Understand a program
written by someone else. See what it takes to understand and fix it
when the original programmers are not around. Think about how to
design your programs to make it easier for those who will maintain
them after you. Slovak
(Jan Waclawek)
Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one
language that emphasizes class abstractions (like Java or C++), one
that emphasizes functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML or
Haskell), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one
that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++
Turkish
templates), and one that emphasizes parallelism (like Clojure or
(Çağıl Uluşahin)
Go).

Remember that there is a "computer" in "computer science".

Know how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction,
fetch a word from memory (with and without a cache miss), read
Ukranian
consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk.
(Answers here.) (Oleksii
Molchanovskyi)
Get involved in a language standardization effort. It could be the
ANSI C++ committee, or it could be deciding if your local coding
style will have 2 or 4 space indentation levels. Either way, you
learn about what other people like in a language, how deeply they
feel so, and perhaps even a little about why they feel so.
 Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort
as quickly as possible.

With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book
learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and
still felt like a clueless novice. 30 Months later, when my second child
was due, did I go back to the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied
on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and
reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts.

Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part plan for
finding great software designers:

1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.

2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of

the prospect and carefully keep a career file.

3. Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and

stimulate each other.

This assumes that some people already have the qualities necessary for
being a great designer; the job is to properly coax them along. Alan Perlis
put it more succinctly: "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo
would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great
programmers". Perlis is saying that the greats have some internal quality
that transcends their training. But where does the quality come from? Is it
innate? Or do they develop it through diligence? As Auguste Gusteau (the
fictional chef in Ratatouille) puts it, "anyone can cook, but only the
fearless can be great." I think of it more as willingness to devote a large
portion of one's life to deliberative practice. But maybe fearless is a way
to summarize that. Or, as Gusteau's critic, Anton Ego, says: "Not
everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from
anywhere."

So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you'll

probably get some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or your
real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days. How about
working hard to continually improve over 24 months? Well, now you're
starting to get somewhere...

References
Bloom, Benjamin (ed.) Developing Talent in Young People, Ballantine,
1985.

Brooks, Fred, No Silver Bullets, IEEE Computer, vol. 20, no. 4, 1987, p.
10-19.

Bryan, W.L. & Harter, N. "Studies on the telegraphic language: The

acquisition of a hierarchy of habits. Psychology Review, 1899, 8, 345-375

Hayes, John R., Complete Problem Solver Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989.

Chase, William G. & Simon, Herbert A. "Perception in Chess" Cognitive
Psychology, 1973, 4, 55-81.

Lave, Jean, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in

Everyday Life, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Answers
Approximate timing for various operations on a typical PC:

execute typical instruction 1/1,000,000,000 sec = 1 nanosec

fetch from L1 cache memory 0.5 nanosec
branch misprediction 5 nanosec
fetch from L2 cache memory 7 nanosec
Mutex lock/unlock 25 nanosec
fetch from main memory 100 nanosec
send 2K bytes over 1Gbps
20,000 nanosec
network
read 1MB sequentially from
250,000 nanosec
memory
fetch from new disk location
8,000,000 nanosec
(seek)
read 1MB sequentially from disk 20,000,000 nanosec
send packet US to Europe and 150 milliseconds = 150,000,000
back nanosec

Appendix: Language Choice

Several people have asked what programming language they should learn
first. There is no one answer, but consider these points:

Use your friends. When asked "what operating system should I

use, Windows, Unix, or Mac?", my answer is usually: "use
whatever your friends use." The advantage you get from learning
from your friends will offset any intrinsic difference between OS,
or between programming languages. Also consider your future
friends: the community of programmers that you will be a part of if
you continue. Does your chosen language have a large growing
community or a small dying one? Are there books, web sites, and
online forums to get answers from? Do you like the people in those
forums?
Keep it simple. Programming languages such as C++ and Java are
designed for professional development by large teams of
experienced programmers who are concerned about the run-time
efficiency of their code. As a result, these languages have
complicated parts designed for these circumstances. You're
 concerned with learning to program. You don't need that
complication. You want a language that was designed to be easy to
learn and remember by a single new programmer.
Play. Which way would you rather learn to play the piano: the
normal, interactive way, in which you hear each note as soon as
you hit a key, or "batch" mode, in which you only hear the notes
after you finish a whole song? Clearly, interactive mode makes
learning easier for the piano, and also for programming. Insist on a
language with an interactive mode and use it.

Given these criteria, my recommendations for a first programming

language would be Python or Scheme. Another choice is Javascript, not
because it is perfectly well-designed for beginners, but because there are
so many online tutorials for it, such as Khan Academy's tutorial. But your
circumstances may vary, and there are other good choices. If your age is
a single-digit, you might prefer Alice or Squeak or Blockly (older
learners might also enjoy these). The important thing is that you choose
and get started.

Appendix: Books and Other Resources

Several people have asked what books and web pages they should learn
from. I repeat that "book learning alone won't be enough" but I can
recommend the following:

Scheme: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

(Abelson & Sussman) is probably the best introduction to
computer science, and it does teach programming as a way of
understanding the computer science. You can see online videos of
lectures on this book, as well as the complete text online. The book
is challenging and will weed out some people who perhaps could
be successful with another approach.
Scheme: How to Design Programs (Felleisen et al.) is one of the
best books on how to actually design programs in an elegant and
functional way.
Python: Python Programming: An Intro to CS (Zelle) is a good
introduction using Python.
Python: Several online tutorials are available at Python.org.
Oz: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
(Van Roy & Haridi) is seen by some as the modern-day successor
to Abelson & Sussman. It is a tour through the big ideas of
programming, covering a wider range than Abelson & Sussman
while being perhaps easier to read and follow. It uses a language,
Oz, that is not widely known but serves as a basis for learning
other languages. <

Notes
T. Capey points out that the Complete Problem Solver page on Amazon
now has the "Teach Yourself Bengali in 21 days" and "Teach Yourself
Grammar and Style" books under the "Customers who shopped for this
item also shopped for these items" section. I guess that a large portion of
the people who look at that book are coming from this page. Thanks to
Ross Cohen for help with Hippocrates.

Peter Norvig (Copyright 2001—2014)