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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?
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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.
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.
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
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.
Yes, HTML is a programming language.
I know this is heresy, but bear with me for a moment. No, HTML isn't Turing-complete, and anyone who's done any kind of dynamic content work with Javascript, PHP, etc. is well aware of HTML's limitations. Nonetheless, writing a web page in plain HTML is much, much closer to "real" programming than it is to the way most people interact with computers.
Most people do something on a computer that gets an immediate response. Hit a key in a word processor, see the letter you typed appear on screen. Click a mouse button in a game, shoot the bad guy. Type a URL into a browser, get a page.
OTOH, writing a page in HTML (using a text editor, I mean) even a page that just says "Hello, world" on a colored background, requires understanding the concept of code. Instead of action-and-response, you have text that makes the computer do something that does not follow immediately from the text at the time you enter it. This may seem trivial to techies, but it's an enormous conceptual leap for most users -- and once they've made that leap, programming as a concept is no longer nearly so mysterious.
This is the way it worked for me, as an adult. I was the kind of user whom non-techies think of as "computer-literate," which meant I could use all kinds of different programs and do some low-level troubleshooting, but I simply had no understanding of what programming was, and in fact had a kind of mental block against it dating from when my Dad tried to teach me C when I was a teenager in the 80's. It wasn't that I couldn't learn it, but I had convinced myself that I couldn't learn it, and that amounted to the same thing.
In the 90's, I decided that I really wanted to at least learn how to make a decent web page, so I started doing "view source" on every page I liked, and got reasonably competent at reusing other people's HTML. Next I started writing my own. Then I realized that a lot of the stuff I wanted to do would be a lot easier if I learned this Javascript thing people were talking about, and, well, off I went. By the time I found my way back to C (and C++, and PHP, and Java, and Perl, and MATLAB, and Python, and R, in roughly that order) I realized this programming stuff wasn't so mysterious and scary after all.
During my academic CS career, I saw a lot of people go this same route. Don't sell HTML short.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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!
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.