Slashdot Mirror
Literacy: Natural Language vs. Code
sirReal.83. writes "The Guardian has an article by Dylan Evans, author of Introducing Evolutionary Psychology. The article discusses literacy in computer languages, and suggests that we are in the 'technological middle ages.' Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking; just as we try to make computers to adapt to us, we must adapt to them." Some good points are raised, with the example of the command line interface used, which is a much better choice than, say, an array of switches or a punch card.
Not really. It is an issue where programmers them selves no longer have to understand computers to program. Going thew college there were way to many students saying "Why do I have to take a course in assembly? We never need to program in it." The future programmers them selves are no longer really understanding what is happening underneath as well. With languages like VB and others high level languages, people can get things done. But this where the scary part is. Is the people who do know how it works in more detail, they are more feared because they know to much and people wont higher them because they feel their skills are to specialized.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This type of nonsense always comes from programmer geeks, too. Face it, the computer is a tool, not an end in itself. Sure, it'd be nice if every school child could write perl and understood regular expressions, but why? I'm sure most of you can drive a car, but how many can rebuild an engine? Can you do a brake job? Sure, being a mechanic in the height of the industrial age would have given you a financial advantage over your peers, but in the end, the automobile is just a tool that gets you from point A to B. The same is true of computers, it's just a tool. If I'm say, a theoretical chemist, why would I need to understand how to get under the hood of my operating system and tinker with it. It's just a tool. I might be interested in some scripting language that my chemistry visualization or analysis programs use, but for the most part, I shouldn't have to tinker with my computer. I should be able to put the key in the ignition (login) and it should work. If it's broken, then I take it to the technician and let her get under the hood.
An interesting concept. And this is exactly why Open Source software should be promoted.
The spread of human language has been an accumulative process. After the middle ages, when more and more people became literate, there was a corresponding increase in writers. The more writers, the more literature was available, which generated more ideas for more literature. It built on itself. Literature was Open Source. Anybody could take existing material and take ideas from that to build more material.
When we come to a similar stage with comptuers it will be the same thing. Programming will no longer be for the scholars, and more and more people will begin to take part. And the more software in the collective existence, the more resources there are to build more software. But it needs to be Open Source to facilitate the accumulative process.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
So, I'm reading this little article right, the man is here comparing the ability to read in general with teh ability to read and write code and laying a claim that in the future everyone must know how to read and write code because the current interfaces we have are illusions, or some other such nonsense, and that the ability to read an write code will be integral to ever profession.
I think regular literacy is just great, in an information based economy and world, you really can't get along without the ability to understand the assemblage of alphabetic characters or pictograms if that is your preference.
However, it is not necessary to know some really arcane computer programmingn code to be able to turn on a computer and use an internet browser. That's why we have computer programmers, to give us tools based on these machines that everyone can use, Windows is popular because you just turn it on and look at pictures and words in an easy to understand format (except on very poorly done websites).
We must adapt to computers, sure we do, we need to bring out culture into an age where informations is availible at the touch of a button. What captain Dylan fails to understand is that though it may seem, these machines are not gods that enslave us with their cold bluish glow, but they're tools. He starts out with a premise and is just ranting about that, he has no real arguments, no real evidence to back it up besides the fact that he wrote a book, wow, that makes someone an authoritative expert on everything.
Let's deconstruct shall we, here's my favorite line...
This is yet another reason why Windows is such a dangerous commodity. It lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.
Now, I get just as pissed when Windows crashes on me, or drops my internet protocols so I can't get on the network. But to say that Windows (specifically mind you, He doesn't talk about Mac OSes, you know the ones that windows holds an eerie resemblance to) creates an illusion that we can interact with computers on a level that the average person would appreciate straight out of the box is just unfounded, and I'll tell you why. Because it works, sure when everything was punch cards and cryptographic text you needed to have some specialized training to get computers to do what you wanted, but now that computing is something well into the mainstream people are picking it up much like any other bit of technology, like hammers (not the best analogy but whatever), I feel that Mr. Evans failed to grasp thtt the reason why computers are so indemnic now is that they do offer a clear and simple solution.
In 50 years, perhaps much less, the ability to read and write code will be as essential for professionals of every stripe as the ability to read and write a human language is today. If your children's children can't speak the language of the machines, they will have to get a manual job - if there are any left.
This part was pretty funny. For someone who wrote a book on evolutionary psychology he doesn't seem to grasp the concept of gradual specialization within a society. you see eventually as a society progresses, you get people whose job it is to think, and expressing that further you beginto develop proffesional groups as thought progresses. Eventually these professional groups become specialized themselves, like docotrs, sure way back in the day you went to your barber if you needed a good bleeding or if you wanted a limb off, but today there is a specialty for almost every concern. I look at it like food, not everyone is a farmer right? Yet, we all benefit from the product of a farmer's labor. Now agriculture has been around for let's say 10,000 years, most of us would be hard pressed if
The people who make comparisons to microwaves and cars are missing the point. A microwave is designed to do one thing and one thing only. A computer is designed to do, well, anything. The idea that the interface of a general purpose tool should be as simple as that of a more specialized tool is silly. The whole *point* of a computer is its complexity.
In this context, the article's assertion makes a bit more sense. People who use tools to solve problems need to understand the nature of those tools. Thus, people who use computers to solve new and interesting problems need to understand what a computer actually does before they even begin to work on a solution. Perhaps in fifty years time we will be using computers for much more interesting things in daily life than we do now. Given the existance of a near-natural language interface and voice recognition, tasks like word processing become trivial. The goal, then, is to be able to instruct the computer what to do in the most efficient way possible. Short of a strong AI, the only way to do that is to understand a bit about how a computer works.
When you look at things this way, the article doesn't seem quite so extreme. I don't know about "every secretary in the world", but I can see plenty of circumstances where complex instructions would need to be turned into "programming" to get anything out of them.
Visit the
I'm a programmer for quite a long time. I've dealt with designing interfaces (not too bad at it) and implementing other's designs (some are really great, it's where i've learned). Keeping the insides-in and the outsides-out is what keeps our lives simple. It's also what makes interface programming such a friggin' pain.
Let's take a screen that has just a simple checkbox. On.. off.. that's pretty easy.
Something more complex: a set of radio buttons. If none are on by default, you have to add a check to make sure things are fine.
Now let's add something like the slashdot post-comment page. Strip all "bad stuff", check that both aren't empty and check against a few rules.
How about an international address form. City/state is in the US or CANADA, you check for zip codes of certain types. (I know these two off the top ya' brit's
Want to include a phone number? Forget it. In the US, it's an area code that doesn't begin with 1 or 0, doesn't have 3 repeating digits (I believe), prefix doesn't start with 555, 1,0 or a few other things. No symbols except possibly -'s in the right place...
Now if this were done all premptively, warning you "no, you can't do that" along the way, it's one big pain-in-the-ass. Warning you after the fact that you can't continue is also another big PITA.
But you know what? It's so very necessary. Anyone remember OS/2's SYS1375 error? I hated that frickin' thing. It was the equiv of a segfault or sigbus in OS/2, when a program crashed... something like that. But you know what, those overly-verbose messages are great when you are in charge of maintaining or creating a system.
In the end, I want to be babied from A->B when going through some task or process that has an interface. I like the idea of not needing to consciously think that, "I have to create an image of a cd first THEN i burn it." That's one thing I like about CD burning tools vs cli's making an ISO first and then burning. I wish configuring a kernel to my system were that simple. It'd be nice if it all worked with autodetecting modules upon first-time startup.
It's the difference of wasting those internal mental cycles of figuring out what's going on. If I wanted complex, I'd figure out how to read my phone bill. They like to send it in spanish, though I told them I want it in english. Morons..
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
There is one area of everyday human activity where complex logical structures are always expressed using natural language without any aid from more formalized languages and systems of expression.
It's called legal system, and it's a mess so huge, no one, human or machine, can predict its behavior, and an army of lawyers, judges and lawmakers of all kinds spend untold amounts of time trying to implement it in their various ways. If computer programming will ever turn into something that resembles this, determining which color should be a pixel (15, 351) ten seconds into a Quake game will be a process not unlike the Kobe Bryant case.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
>Out of the 40 people that started a Java class in my college, only 6 of us finished it. 34 couldn't keep pace and couldn't understand it.
Well, look at how programming is taught today compared to the late 80s.
When we were taught BASIC on machines that were only command line, people were quick to pick it up. Why? Because you could actually do stuff with it. At the time writing an app that did stuff like simple math, outputted to the printer, displayed a simple ASCII graph, etc. This is what computers did and being able to do this with a few lines of BASIC code was actually empowering.
Now look at what computers do now: everything. And they do it with neat-o GUIs. Also, many commercial apps are written so you don't have to program. You don't have Ford telling you that you should be popping open the hood on a brand new car and doing some major work do you?
Anyway, walk into a Java class. First thing they teach isn't how you can use java to solve problems like sorting text files, etc they throw the bible of OOP at you. OOP is fine and good, but if you don't have some procedural experience under your belt and know your way around at least another language Java is just going to be a mix of OOP, classes, etc and other junk a lot of people are not going to see how it all connects to their everyday tasks. Even if you master Java you're writing horribly slow apps designed for cross-platform applications. Not exactly empowerment there. Sure, you can move to any language from there, but starting to learn programming with Java is like kick in the teeth.
I think Dylan should have focused on how empowering HTML, Javascript, and PHP are. After reading a book or looking at a few examples you can quickly get the gist of HTML. Same with javascript. The stuff runs, it does stuff, you can show it to your friends, etc. Shift to PHP are you're doing tons more stuff, while your Java programmer is fighting his or her through a complex language with a strict syntax (at least a lot more unforgiving than HTML or PHP).
If there's a lesson here its embrace modern tools that accomplish something. Moving back to the command line is silliness for most people as they never leave the GUI and don't expect a CL program to be of much use. Giving them the power to generate GUI-like apps through HTML, etc is much more useful than spending 18 hours learning how to use cat, emacs, pipes, uniq, head, tail, etc on Cygwin.
Its a web/GUI world. This is what people should be adopting to. The days of simple DOS-like programs are far behind us and a lot of scripting tasks can be done within robust GUI apps.