In this episode, Alex Miller chats with former Strange Loop speaker Felienne Hermans about her new book "The Programmer's Brain" (https://www.manning.com/books/the-programmers-brain). Listeners to this episode can get 35% off at Manning (http://mng.bz/vzmx) with the code podstrangeloop21
Felienne Hermans (https://www.felienne.com/) is associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University, doing research on programming education (https://perl.liacs.nl/).
Felienne's Strange Loop talks mentioned in the show: - (2014) "Spreadsheets for developers", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CKru5d4GPk - (2019) "How to teach programming (and other things)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ
The Hedy programming language - https://hedy-beta.herokuapp.com/ - https://github.com/Felienne/hedy
You can find out more about Strange Loop at https://thestrangeloop.com.
Chapters ---------------
00:00 Intro 00:51 Overview of "The Programmer's Brain" 03:21 How does memory affect how we read code? 05:28 How do mental models affect understanding? 07:10 How do you intentionally practice reading code? 11:18 Vocalization of syntax 17:11 Explicit instruction vs immersion 18:44 Hedy programming language 21:19 Spreadsheets are programming 27:43 Release plans for "The Programmer's Brain"