Stanford Golf Phenom Rose Zhang Turns Pro, Vows To 'Never Code Again' - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

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  She's not a CS major - it says so right there in TFS. So why should her statement that she "will never code again" a big deal? She almost certainly would "never code again" even if she never took that course!

  Also - why is a CS class even required for a non-CS major?

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    This is pretty typical for any liberal arts degree. You're expected to have a well-rounded education, and a basic familiarity with programming is broadly useful.
    
    I'm skeptical of her claim that she'll never code again. She might not write software, but basic coding practices are used in a lot of other disciplines. Even if all you want to do is something mildly fancy with a spreadsheet.

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      Its more about improving the university employment stats for liberal arts graduates.:-)

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      Me too, since there's an entire sport [stackexchange.com] that's practically designed just for her.

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    Many STEM majors recommend a programming class or two, some require it. A physicist or chemist who can code a little can be useful. It only becomes dangerous when they code a lot.:-)

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      Hey I was a physics major you insensitive clod!

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        All joking aside, a research chemist that I had the opportunity to talk to said he would rather have a CS major with one year of chemistry handle his team's programming than a chemistry major with one year of CS.

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    Why? Programming is an extremely useful skill immediately applicable to any field. It's also so easy to learn that primary school children can, and very often do, teach themselves. You'll find no shortage of working professionals who have picked it up just to make their jobs easier.

    She can claim that she'll "never code again" and that might be true, but she'll be making her life significantly more difficult if she sticks to it. Just like those poor misguided high school kids who insist that they'll "nev

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      She can claim that she'll "never code again" and that might be true, but she'll be making her life significantly more difficult if she sticks to it.

      Guys, the person we're talking about here is a rising star pro athlete [nytimes.com]. Her coach at Stanford stated, "She's the absolute GOAT. She is the best amateur of all time." She has an estimated net worth of $30 million [themastersgolftv.com]. She just landed a sponsorship from Delta Airlines [sbnation.com].

      She is not going to be spending her life programming computers.

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        Okay... so... why is she at Stanford? Just for kicks? For the love of red tile roofs?

        She presumably has ambitions beyond playing golf. In whatever profession she intends to apply her education, being able to write computer programs will be an enormous benefit.

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    At my university word was that it was a way out of taking a math class. Not even an advanced math class. It's just that it was programming or X, Y, or Z math class.

    So you had people already bad at math trying to code...

    Of course, as a CS major I had to not only take the programming classes, but enough math that I have a minor in it.

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    The only reason it's at all newsworthy is that she's a well known golfer. If she was a "regular" person complaining about how CS is hard, nobody would blink an eye.

• It's not that programming is hard per se. It's that most of these 'introductory' CS courses are designed and paced for students who have significant prior programming experience and familiarity, yielding the same kind of results that you'd get from making an 'intro' calculus class that has no testing or prior coursework requirements.

  Sure, students who have had experience with most of the foundational bits will do fine, but the vast majority of the students that don't hit it bounce and never come back. CS departments are just terrible at handling anyone who doesn't want to devote their life to CE/CS.

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    Sorry, but programming per se is hard. Like all engineering.

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      Basic (pun semi-intended) programming is not difficult, we did it in my elementary school. It was quite trivial, but kids are doing more complex stuff at that age now when given the opportunity. Whether it's really going to be valuable to people at this point is another story, but I do think one or two programming classes during the course of your education could be valuable in navigating a world which is heavily computerized. Having some notion of what computers actually do under the hood helps make sense

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        Yeah so about that.

        It's weird. We did it in my senior school, year 1 or 7 as it's now known, age 12 or so.

        Me and a friend came along with some prior skills and competed to make the best game. Most people had never done anything at all. I think most if not all of the class got basic scripted adventure games working and I don't ubuntu anyone was stuck forever in the basic syntax. Even the duffers.

        But fast forward to age 19 or so and plenty of smart people, at university ego scam do stuff I can't do well, jus

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      Programming isn't anything remotely like engineering. It's even illegal to call yourself a "software engineer" in many places.

      It's also really easy. Programming is a skill so easy to learn that children can, and very often do, teach themselves.

      If it looks hard to you, that's because the industry has layered on an astonishing amount of needless complexity, cynically in the name of making things simpler. See, we know how to actually make things simpler, but we don't. The modern "software crisis" is one en

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        Legal in every state I've ever worked in.
        An unlicensed engineer can work as such under whatever your state's industrial exemption is.
        There are probably some states which don't have industrial exemptions, but I've never lived in one.
        
        My understanding is that it's currently a bit of a legal war up in Canada right now, but I mean... any software engineer trained in Canada is going to move down to the states for the money, anyway.

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          This may come as a surprise to you, but your sample of one isn't representative. Texas, for example, is not shy at all about cracking down on insecure programmers who insist on pretending that they're engineers.

          Legal or not, it's absolutely disgusting seeing a programmer go around pretending that they're an engineer just to boost their fragile ego. I put it in the same class as stolen valor. You are not an engineer. Pretending that you are is an insult to real engineers.

          Stop pretending to be something t

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    The are intro CS classes for STEM majors and non-STEM majors. The latter should be able to keep up, been there, done that, non-CS STEM at the time. No programming experience beyond self-taught programming of my calculator.

    I think this is overstating things a little. You sure a bad experience was not due to a bad instructor?

    As they should. Which is why non-STEM majors should have a different intro class than the STEM folks.

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    It's worth pointing out that it's always been like that. When I went to college in the 90's, they pretty much just dumped us on to an HP-UX system with an Emacs cheat-sheet and left us to figure out what to do on our own. All our work had to be submit via a VAX account, and they barely even showed us how to log in. For students who only had access to MS-DOS machines (or in my case an Amiga), that was a shock. Prior to college, I never had access to a C compiler at all. It was... difficult. Most people

• If you are good enough to get into Stanford, you can deal with "a lot of ground is covered for someone new to XYZ". Actually there are more than a few classes like this at Stanford. I've tutored undergrads there. Classes move fast. If you can't handle it, you are in the wrong place. I've seem Olympic level swimmers there have a look of terror thinking, "I'm not going to make it here." Yep. Standford isn't easy.

  My CS 101 book was "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". A challenging book for CS101, but damn was it rewarding. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs).

  Classes that push your limits are a gift. Getting into Stanford is a gift. If a class isn't hard, you aren't getting enough benefit.

• CS101 is hard for the people who will never get it. When I was in school most of the class was not back next quarter and while some of those definitely got it and wanted to learn it to some other end than getting a CS degree; A lot of dreams were broken too.

  The profs were rather relaxed and didn’t bust anyone’s balls. The language was Python. They were really doing all they could and it just didn’t click. Most of the remaining students managed to navigate later hurdles like a lousy Java professor or later assignments being given in languages we were never taught which are both higher bars to clear than learning basic Python.

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    I worked closely with computer science professors early in my teaching career. According to them their CS101 course was purposely designed to weed out at least 50% of the students. I understood their side of it but damn that was harsh. This was in the early 2000s and the language used was VB.NET.

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      Weeding out as many VB programmers as possible should have been considered a public service.

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      It was needed. That was when too many kids starting going into CS because parents or guidance councilors told them it would be a good career path. Better to weed out the dimmer of those. The smarter of those that could squeak through were bad enough. Half the job of hiring programmers is to tell those who have a genuine interest from those on the "good career" ticket punching path.
      
      The faster those not truly interested in STEM are weeded out and transferred to the school of business the better for all.

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    Just imagine if Rose Zhang took the CS 106A student body out for golf lessons... I imagine you'd see a lot of individual variability there - probably even moreso. Luckily you don't have to be a superstar at CS (like she is at golf) to make a living.
• according to the latest (or not so latest) mantra being thrown around, everyone needs to be a coder!
  *cough* bullshit *cough*

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    Cough cough your point is flawed cough cough

    Not everyone NEEDS to be able to read and write. Illiterates can survive in society. Likewise with the innumerate.You don't NEED to know anything about civics. You did NEED to be able to cook or even make a sandwich.

    An ignorance of coding is like ignorance of those. You should know the basics of how life works in this world even if you are not a professional or even amateur expert. People need to have some grounding to be able to separate

• Not everyone can be good both at golf and software engineering.
  But luckily CharGPT can solve the golf part.

• Curious, I examined the Stanford and Harvard introductory courses. Is this really how they teach these days? Both classes are just awful, my god. How they handle the psychology of the learner and the knowledge navigation is appalling.

  Am I being elitist? No. The Harvard CS50 is absolutely awful. They jam sets of topics into one week that should be covered in more time; even with motivated students doing a lot of outside reading, the course material is utterly ridiculously done. Either this is only a summary outline kind of course, or it completely fails the purpose of giving new students a solid grounding. one week for data structures? One week for algorithms? You have got to be kidding.

  As for the Stanford course, its side introduction to Python is laughably bad in its sketchiness.

  For shame, both schools.

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• And it makes you weird. I'm proof of that.

  Luckily it's not for everyone. We all have bills, income, and most have assets and investments. But does everyone do their own accounting just because we are all capable of basic arithmetic? Turns out accounting is more complicated and boring than one might initially assume. Just as we hire weirdos that like to fill computers with code, we will hire accountants, landscapers, and proctologists to do the things that we don't want to learn to do for ourselves.

• Look, I get some of the reasons why. But that language is trash, something that's meant to be used to write one-liners ought to be a joke. I suppose it's possible to write readable and easy to follow code in python, but most examples I've seen was so damn hard to parse it made my little grays revolt.

  When I started CS we used sml, I know it's not the most modern of languages but at least it was meta-like. Even basic would be better than python to use as a first language.

  But certainly, there are lots of reas