Hard Work and Practice in Programming

At the Program For the Future event commemorating the 40th anniversary of Doug Englebart's "mother of all demos" in 1968, I was privileged to hear an inspired rant by Alan Kay about the unwillingness of people to work hard to learn new skills. I'm quoting from memory, so the lines below are not exact, and there's no way I can convey the wonderful sense of outrage expressed in Alan's voice, but I hope you can imagine it:

If some entrepreneur introduced the bicycle today, no one would fund him. You have to actually learn how to use it! ...I saw a controller for Guitar Hero that costs a couple of hundred dollars. You can get a decent electric guitar for that price. But you'd have to actually learn something to play it!

There's a long arc in computing that teaches us how much we gain through advances in ease-of-use, with the iPhone being the latest breakthrough success. But it's important to remember how much we lose when we think that ease of use is everything. Many things worth doing are hard, requiring a great deal of practice before you achieve mastery.

Shortly thereafter, I was intrigued to see an interview entitled Bjarne Stroustrup on Educating Software Developers (via Slashdot) sounding the same theme:

High schools could teach students to work hard at something (just about anything), to search out information as needed, and learn to express their ideas in writing and orally. Project-based work is good for that. Exactly which programming language is used for software is less important, but the aim should not be to make tasks as simple as possible but to challenge students.

And of course, practice, specifically "10,000 hours of practice" during childhood, is one of the themes of Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers.

The interview with Stroustrup provoked a great discussion on the O'Reilly editors' backchannel. It was so juicy that I wanted to share it with all of you.

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