Smart people learning to program...

This post is about taking on challenges. Here is a photo of my cucumber plant ready to take on any challenges. See that? He's holding a fucking hat pin. Don't mess with him or he'll fuck you up. Take that, challenge!

My sister (the middle one) has embarked down the respectable path of acquiring a PhD in the field of... bio-chem-ish-something... She's over out at U of Madison which is nice because that means she's living near our father's side of the family. Nice people, them.

Anyway, dear sister K and I don't talk much, which is fine. We're rather different folks... but just last week (or so) ago I got an email out of the blue notifying me that sister dearest has signed up for a class on Perl! Oh joy! Never before has she shown the slightest interest in programming and now she is (rather unprompted) elected to take a class on it. Unfortunately it's an intense summer course with classes every day and it failed to notify her of several pre-reqs that are kinda' required. Or at least suggested... and oh my how she should have taken them. I've been talking her through a couple subjects... it's been a while since I've "taught" programming and it's... different with A) a sibling B) someone who isn't a child/dumb AND isn't really into it. It means she's bright enough to get it but doesn't quite... go out there and try to learn. No- she is trying to learn. But she's not trying to.. really dig in and grasp everything?

Subjects that have confused her so far :

• Hashes. Somehow her professor phrased something in such a way that she basically thought hashes were a collection of key & value pairs where *every* pair you gave it was stored. She thought she could add several sets of pairs all with the same key and then request the set of pairs that matched a given key and iterate over them. I feel bad because I can totally see how that could make sense... and yet she really, really had to struggle to get back onto the right track. You know, the whole "keys are unique" idea...
  
• Debugging. She gets stuck and then... I don't know what... I told her that she really should be printing out the values of things to "check" them but it just... it doesn't seem to click with her. She prints some now but without additional comments (so the spew is a really confusing jumbled mess) and not all the information. Also, walking through the code. I can't tell if it doesn't occur to her or she can't do it herself. When we do it together she can quickly spot the problems...
  
• Initializing values. Several times now when discussing a problem with her I realize she's initializing some value inside a while loop and over-writing the existing data she was hoping to collect. We had a long conversation about the idea of conditionally initializing something and it... didn't go well. This is the most fascinating problem of them all to me because I cannot figure out what her brain is thinking...
  

Anyway... have been having several (of my first!) video conferences with her. Talking about programming is fun but I'm severely out of practice. And an even worse word-garbler then before. In the theme of things over-coming obstacles, here is a photo of my cucumber plant from last week. Notice that it has a baby cucumber on it. Fuck yeah! Take that you tiny-container doubters!! (to be fair I've no reason to believe it will actually make it to maturity yet...) Also- all 3 of my edamame plants of popped out pods... even the severely retarded/bonsi one. All pods scaled to the appropriate size so far.