* * * * *
                                        
             “Those who can, do. Those who can't, still get jobs.”
                                        
> Abstract: All teachers of programming find that their results display a
> ‘double hump’. It is as if there are two populations: those who can, and
> those who cannot, each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all
> research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on
> teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE
> (Integrated Development Environment) and work on motivation. None of it
> works, and the double hump persists. We have a test which picks out the
> population that can program, before the course begins. We can pick apart
> the double hump. You probably don't believe this, but you will after you
> hear the talk. We don't know exactly how/why it works, but we have some
> good theories.
> 

“A cognitive study of early learning of programming [1]”

I myself have heard plenty of horror stories about applicant programmers who
can't program [2], but even simple programs [3] (via Ceej [4], from where I
found the other links) can trip up a seasoned programmer (I tried the
FizzBuzz program, and my first two attempts had bugs—sigh).

I just find it hard to believe that there are so many bad programmers out
there [5].

[1] http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
[2] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000781.html
[3] http://tickletux.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/using-
[4] http://snippy.ceejbot.com/wiki/show/start/2007/02/27/002
[5] http://worsethanfailure.com/Default.aspx

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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