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Do Kids Still Program?
From his journal, hogghogg asks: "I keep finding myself in conversations with tertiary educators in the hard sciences (Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, etc.) who note that even the geeks—those who voluntarily choose to major in hard sciences—enter university never having programmed a computer. When I was in grade six, the Commodore PET came out, and I jumped at the opportunity to learn how to program it. Now, evidently, most high school computer classes are about Word (tm) and Excel (tm). Is this a bad thing? Should we care?" Do you think the desire to program computers has declined in the younger generations? If so, what reasons might you cite as the cause?
Most kids are taught in high school that HTML is a PROGRAMMING language. It is very common for younger nerds to want to make web pages. Some of them even venture into Javascriptlets. Few blossom into real programmers, but it could be noted that HTML, because of how commonplace it is, is the gateway language to keyboard hacking.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Let's see, what will a qualified programmer do?
Work in an environment where pay and job security is according to seniority, not competance. Work with lazy and dumb students who disrupt class, yet can not be kicked out or even (except in Texas) spanked. Get stuck doing odd jobs like minding the bus loading/unloading area and trying to stop food fights.
Work in a cubicle for $40000 to $150000 while surrounded by fairly intelligent nerds and all the Mountain Dew you can drink.
Gee, I dunno...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Frankly, I think the real problem lies in the fact that the standard OS nowadays (Windows) does not come with a readily accessible programming language. Back in the good ol' days, there was GW-BASIC and (later) Q-Basic. Qbasic even came with some games (remember gorilla?), that you could look at and see how things are done. All that made for a low technical barrier to entry (but not for good programming style). Now, unless you've got an inclination for programming, there's no way you can get started easily.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary, and those that don't.
My nephew used to brag to me about how he was some l337 haxor with mad skills.
He was hanging out on various web sites with all of the other cool script kiddies. In his mind, getting stuff from the web without knowing what it was; or designing web pages with a WYSYWIG HTML editor; or using a level-editor to make a new map -- all of that WAS cool. He just couldn't grasp that he wasn't doing anything difficult, and certainly not worthy of his haxor belief about himself. In reality, he was running other people's programs and using interfaces to do stuff.
Kids today either don't fully understand what it is they're doing, or think something utterly trivial is l337.
They can accomplish a whole lot of 'meaningful' tasks with the software which is readily available for free. They don't *need* to try and cobble together little wee programs to achieve minor tasks. Back in the day, we were happy to achieve tasks which are, nowadays, stinkin' trivial. Because the computer didn't do much unless we made it so.
Kids nowadays don't find themselves confronted with the need to program -- they're not staring at a blinking cursor trying to figure out what to do. They go onto teh intarweb and download it. They're not trying desperately trying to figure out how to write something to make the creation/management of D&D characters (or, whatever). They're downloading free (or pirated) software which already accomplishes what they need to do.
People aren't programming out of necessity anymore, they're running software on the magic box which has always been there. They don't need to think about how software gets made in the first place. The generation before them have filled in most of the gaps for them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
For three years, I taught myself through online tutorials here and there. Freshman year of high school I did a lot of programming, because I wanted to show my stuff off the the computer programming teacher (the class is only offered to sophmores and higher). Last year, once I was in the class I discovered how terrible high school is. In a one semester class, the other students only had a rudimentary knowledge of functions and no idea what OOP was. Basically it was a study hall for me, though I did write a tic-tac-toe game in C using SDL to show I did something.
I'd have to say that my knowledge of C++ is pretty rough. I may know syntax, but I sure as hell don't know how to use it for anything complicated. That said, sophmore year, I competed in the National FBLA competition for C++ programming and got 6th! This absolutely surprised me. Surely there must be more people who know C++ than this?
I'm disappointed in the US, in my teachers, and the school board. I've tried as hard as I could to learn in high school, but I end up being a slacker. Even classes at the local technical college (I've taken C# so far) have been a disappointment.
In general, students aren't encouraged to do programming at all. Math books have logic cicuits, boolean logic, and tons of example BASIC programs, but teachers skip over them. Educators need to educate, not push kids through school.
Depends on the school - my kids went to one like that, but I pulled them out. The district mandated this miserable hell of a computer that never even worked. The IT was the worst ever - teachers couldn't even unlock students, 1st graders had to remember these crazy user IDs (like U238A_BBA76 - something to do with class number and student ID)
The school they are in now is much different. It's a mix of Macs, Windows, and Linux with no lockdown at all. No real net connection, but the research machines in the library have them. Ironically, even though the Windows machines are fully loaded with MS Software and games all the kids are clamoring to use the aging Mac G3s and the one old G4. I find it amusing, my self.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Well 0% of the people with playstations know how to program them. 1% may not seem like a lot, (and its a high estimate) but 1% of millions of calculators is still a lot of programmers. I doubt that they know how to program on the PCs. Computers no longer ship with an easy to use basic that gives instant results.
Yes there won't be any formal instruction. Is that a problem? Would any self respecting slashdotter posting at midnight on a friday admit that they needed to be taught programming by a teacher? How much formal teaching did you need to learn the Apple II's built in language?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
You point out six or seven anecdotal examples, but there are many more counter examples out there. For some people the socialization aspect of school is far more important than the academic aspect. In my career -- and it's a reasonably technical field-- I've seen time and time again the ability to socially interact well with a wide variety of people is at least as important as technical skills and raw intelligence.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
I'm actually amazed at what kids are doing with computers today and at such a young age.
Kids are instant messaging and emailing their friends, creating articles on MySpace, creating nifty Flash movies, modding their favorite fps game and distributing their effort over the Internet for 1000s of others to enjoy. They are actually using computers for a purpose rather than as quirky, nerdy obsession
This is WAY more productive and creative than what my friends and I were doing with our computers in the 80s. Kids are not only creating (and hopefully learning along the way) but they are connecting with LOTS of other people in the process!
Perhaps us oldbies view the seemingly lack of interest in actually programming a computer as a problem because we come from a background where the computer was more about what it could potentially do for us rather than what it could actually do at the time. Programming was a necessity to fill that gap, often in relative seclusion and obscurity.
I'm sure our dads say the same thing about us young whipper-snappers not knowing the first thing about the cars we drive and nod knowingly to each other about what a tragedy that is.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
I've been programming since I was 6. Had a C=128 and just HAD to figure out how to program it. Not sure why, just made it my quest. Then we got a 386, and I learned C. I didn't think it was that hard then (in fact, c made a lot more sense to me than BASIC did). After that I took a class in HS in which they taught Turbo Pascal, which I thought was kinda boring until I figured out that I could use ASM statements inline... Now I program in linux.
Now let's look at the one continuity there, they were ALL Command Line environments. Sure I had Win 3.1 but I never did that much in it. And when 95 came out and I wanted to program MFC it seemed like way too much trouble for what I was trying to do. I was eventually able to come up with a patern for setting up the window and everything, but it was kinda more a pain in the ass than it was really productive. And I come to the last part... Now I program in linux. Sure you can do X-windows programming in linux (which I think is easier than MFC and Visual WhatEver++), but I've always gravitated towards simple things like kernel programming and utilities.
Back to my point, the command line based OSes were easy to learn to program with. Minimal setup for your program (heck, include and you're pretty much done.) output is exactly what you want (it's all just text anyway), it's easy to visualize, it's easy to learn, it's easy to get results quickly. Kids have short attention spans in general, so you want something that allows them to be somewhat productive quickly, so they can do a few things and see the fruit of their labor and think "Wow! That's cool! I just made that!" instead of some random windows error. That'll Hook them and they'll want to do more and learn more... sitting down to read a book to figure out the best windowing setup or if they want a DirectX window or a menu bar is kinda a pain and isn't going to grab many kids.
-=JML=-
Would any self respecting slashdotter posting at midnight on a friday admit that they needed to be taught programming by a teacher? How much formal teaching did you need to learn the Apple II's built in language?
Well it's not so much that gifted kids need a teacher to tell them how to program. They need a teacher to encourage them, and that is what's missing. When I was in school teachers didn't mind me spending my time in the computer lab during lunch. And they thought it was really neat what I was doing. Now days I think they just care to put all the kids in a neat rows of seats and bore them to death with lectures.
Perhaps you need the education to understand what "anecdotal" means in this context.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I think the fact that Ruby and Python have interactive interpreters makes them great places to start. Just like many of the old basic interpreters, you can just punch in commands and see what happens. You don't have to open a file, edit it, save it, close it, run it, and then repeat all that when you get errors, you can just type in a command and see what happens -- you get the errors immediately and you even have a command history so you can bring the last line you typed right back up, edit it and try again.
I wish somebody had shown me Lisp when I was 14. All I got was Pascal and 6502.
There is a certain rightness about Lisp same as with *nix. No other language I'm aware of even comes close in the ability to expand programmers minds. It's like comparing budwieser to scotch or absynthe.
Smalltalk is another 'right' language. Pick up the original manuals for Smalltalk/80 and the sense of rigour and completeness is abundant, no silly syntax add ons.
Likewise C. I defy any programmer to pick up Kernighan & Ritchie and not be impressed by the sheer brevity of the language.
Now pickup Stroustrup, or a Java book or Perl or Python. What hits you is the cacaphony of discord, the single pure note lost amongst the poor orchestration.
When C++/Java/Perl/Python have long since been consigned to the garbage colletor in the sky Lisp/Smalltalk/C will still be used to solve problems. I rather think the current period of programming will be seen as the dark ages before the re-birth.
Are you dumm??? :) You don't talk to girls about encoding!! Seriously ... watch some more TV and a bit less PC's :)
Jokes aside, I don't think that the whole world needs to know how PC's are working. I don't think that the majority of people need to know that. As long as you know how to operate a word processor and a spreadsheat program, maybe some software to create presentations (notice how I am using generic terms).... I think you can be considered computer literate. To be able to program in C++ in notepad and compile it using a command line interface, I THINK goes beyond the purpose of computer literacy. I don't think that locked down computers are a bad thing. In fact from what you've been saying (software loading off pen drives, accessing external proxies...) I don't think you computers at school are actually locked down enough. Keep in mind that computers at school are not you computers at home. It's there for public use and has to cater for mostly kids. I don't think that schools should make it a priority on their schedule to allow 12-13 year olds change their desktop picture, color of the taskbar and access porn!
This is beyond true. In fact, the teacher doesn't even need to actively encourage them, all they need to do is provide an environment in which the kids CAN program if they want to. Of course, I'm not telling teachers that they shouldn't encourage kids to program, but even just giving them easy access to netbeans will get them working on stuff. I took both Programming in Java and AP Computer Science in high school and really all our teacher did, especially in AP after we'd learned the basic syntax in the first class, was give us assignments and a link to the API and let us figure them out as a class. It was awesome, most of us did great on the AP exam and they actually ended up having to bring a professor in this year from University of Delaware (where I'm currently a student) in order to teach the next level of compsci to a lot of the then-juniors who had taken AP (I was a senior when I took it). If you have kids with brains and an inclination towards compsci, just give them a computer and a problem to solve and they'll do it, often at a level that exceeds expectations (adding cool GUIs and such). One friend of mine in the class held a summer job (and still works a little bit) as a database scripter/porter for a small car dealership, and he hasn't even graduated high school yet.
But what if you want to be this person or this person or this person? These people did very wonderful things, but those wonderful things require that they have the education to do them.
My advice to smart people; don't drop out. It is possible to do wonderful things without a degree, but a degree will open much more doors, which makes doing those wonderful things much easier than without a degree.
So if I write something in Perl it is a script ?
When I write the same functionality in Common Lisp and run it using clisp, it is a script ?
When I compile it with CMUCL or SBCL, then it suddenly becomes a program ?
I hate this bloody artificial division between 'programs' and 'scripts'. They are all a way of automating things, be it for embedded applications or data processing, and I use Perl daily for data processing, from starting up external applications, gathering data, process results, store and retrieve data from a database and generate reports.
The current state in some schools is worse than a lack of encouragement. Using the computers for anything that the instructors don't understand constitutes "hacking", much of the time. I've gotten in trouble for writing programs on computers (in basic, non-viral, etc). It gets worse. One of my friends tells a story about changing to a non-default printer (the default was set improperly) and getting sent to the vice-principal's office.
For the most part, I was lucky, though. It is the one way I can think of that having out of date equipment was a boon. Most of my schools had machines running windows 3.1, and therefore a full copy of dos including the qbasic.exe binary. That always excited me, being able to add functionality to a machine with something I created. Then again, I'm most of the way through a computer science bachelor's degree now...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Yes I agree. I am a High School Honors Student and I have seen all this first hand. I know that all computer classes are about using word. It's obscene. I think that I was lucky to find programming 1. All people know how to do is sign on to instant messenger and post things on myspace. That's about it. Most of them don't even have coherent writing skills. The education system in our country is crumbling, and it's all happened recently. No child left behind = everyone learns with the idiots.
Being the student ... let's let me take a shot at this one.
In my school, programming 1 is offered (basic and qbasic) as a class, as in programming 2 (visual basic, js, c#) which can be taken as an honors course or a regular course. ONLY students enrolled in those courses have any ability to program, and then only during class. No other computers than the one computer lab we use have any useful software installed, and our accounts only allow us to program during school hours. And yeah .... we can't use any exit commands we put in our porgrams either as that runs into about 80 security measures of doom. We're given visual studio to take home, yet we are unable to e-mail ourselves any projects, and as all of the unused asb ports are taped over simply flaashdriving it up is no good. ... we can't do things like right click on the desktop, do much in my computer (it goes straight to your personal sutedent location, and allows you to go to no higher directory), or even get into the run command to open notepad if we find that easier to write html/js in
Also 'back in the days', computers were cool but couldn't do anything so to say. You had to develop software you wanted yourself. What you did with computers was program them (and play a few games). Nowadays an abundance of cool applications is already available in many flavours. Why program?
> I've never been able to understand this. Why do so many otherwise
;, and so forth. It's always reasonably clear upon looking at C code what is a function, what is a parameter, and where the return values are going. LISP can have the same function, parameters, and return values, but which goes where is determined entirely by the ordering of parentheses.
:) <-- (This parenthesis functions as a smiley, and not as a comment closing.)
> intelligent people have this irrational phobia about parentheses?
> What is it about them that causes people's minds to lock up? I can
> understand complaining about other aspects of Lisp, but this?
It's quite simple, really. Each parenthesis has a slightly different function in the context of the larger program, yet you cannot tell this quickly from looking at them. I mean, look at the above joke sequence, and tell me if there are 7 or 8 parentheses at the opening left side of the sentence (by glancing, without counting). And yes, you can use a program that does parenthesis matching to avoid having mismatches, but it is about more than having the numbers balance, because an infinite number of different configurations of parentheses can have balanced numbers but different behaviors.
Control structures more like the C style have been significantly more popular because there are visual markers indicating function. { and ( are used in different contexts, as are ", ',
So it's not that people are afraid of the parentheses, it's that the parentheses are cumbersome to visually parse into meaning whenever complexity rises. In C style code, a single routine which is becoming more complex tends to simply get longer sequentially. In LISP, a single routine which is becoming more complex tends to get more depth of parentheses, and you start getting structures that look like: ))) (( in the middle. Let's take a piece of example code:
(cond
((< x 400)
(cond
((< x 100)
(prin1 'XC) (decf x 90) )
(T
(prin1 'C) (decf x 100) ) ) )
(T
(prin1 'CD) (decf x 400) ) ) )
I now take a working piece of code, change only a few parentheses, and the behavior has changed. In this case, it should crash, but there are less trivial cases where code will actually run but do something different. Either one is of course bad, since in an ideal situation, a human programmer should be able to discern the function and behavior of a program easily by visual inspection.
(cond
(< x 400)
(cond
(< x 100)
((prin1 'XC) (decf x 90) )
(T
((prin1 'C) (decf x 100) ) ) )
(T
((prin1 'CD) (decf x 400) ) ) ) )
And I'm sure any reasonably competent LISP program can look at the simple code example above and figure out what is wrong with it, but this isn't the point. The point is, the language hinders this process with its symmetry, rather than helps it. For most tasks, languages shouldn't be chosen for their reductionist beauty, but instead, for their ease of use for forming complex structures with human psychology in mind.
I hope that clears it up.
Those are all good languages, but the most important language to learn is the one you use to communicate with your fellow man. It appears to be english.
Please attempt to increase your vocabulary and knowledge of literary references. In that way, you can avoid using vulgar, overused expletives to express your emotion. Cuss words certainly do have an impact, and are quite "edgy," but they are used as a substitute for learning a variety of strong vocabulary. I think in the coming years, you'll probably begin to notice more and more how ignorant it often makes the speaker sound, especially coming from your so-called peers.
Anyway, I urge you to learn other ways to express your emotion, not because the "seven words" are vulgar or inappropriate, but because they indicate so many feelings at once that should really be expounded upon in prose rather than blasted in sharp unspecific staccato.
I, unfortunately, concur.
Our school prides itself on being one of the best public schools in the state, and we have no notable programming/computer science classes. I believe our school had one when I entered in the 7th grade, as I seem to remember being excited about it, but it's since been dropped. We offer a class called "IMS", but, despite it being in the course description, I don't believe they've done any real programming.
And people still aren't any better off - I've fooled people into thinking I've hacked into the FBI with a really cheesy any-real-computer-nerd-would-die-laughing web page. On a laptop with no internet connection. You have people ask you, "You mean you want to sit in front of a computer the rest of your life?", or they'll ask you how to do something with a computer that's way out their (or my) ability - people don't understand that programming isn't just about typing code, that it's a certain way of thinking, a way of wrapping your mind around a problem and being able to describe it to a machine in such detail that it can solve it. As I exquisitely tried to put it one very late night: "People simply misunderstand the type of person a programmer isn't."
It is a shame. I browse and answer questions on programming forums during my spare time, and people post their homework questions in hopes of an answer. What I would give to be able to have homework in programming - they have no idea how lucky they are.
Everything I know, however, I taught myself. (Sort of a neat thing to say, really.) I have little in the way of peers, and no teachers or guidance - any holes in my abilities will surface later. I pronounced "integer" with a hard g until I heard someone say it. I spelled out GUI, whereas most other's I've heard pronouce it ("gooy"), and I pronounce AVI, where I've always heard people spell it out.
Though one unintended consequence of bad schooling: TI-83+s. Our school requires them, and their native ability to use TI-BASIC seems to flush out some programmers. (Though some people who have no desire to program still use it.) Those who do generally start trying to make games, or things to solve various equations. (As opposed to those who merely type them in.)
Teachers tend to trust a student(s) more than the IT department. Some years the IT department was a student. (Ah, the golden years.)
Perhaps this lack of education will cause a shortage of programmers, a spike in demand, and raised salaries for those of us who know what we're doing. Then again, perhaps all our work will be outsourced.
But today the answer is still the same. I will not fix your computer. (I mean, I'm a programmer. I break things. ^_^)