Why Johnny Can't Code and How That Can Change

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses why schools are having a hard time engaging young minds in computer science — and what the Scalable Game Design program in Colorado is doing to try to change that. 'Repenning's program avoids this disheartening cycle in three important ways. First, it deemphasizes programming while still encouraging students to develop the logical thinking skills they'll need for more advanced studies. Second, it engages students by encouraging them to be creative and solve their own problems, rather than just repeating exercises dictated by their instructor. Third, and perhaps most important, students are rewarded for their efforts with an actual, concrete result they can relate to: a game.'"

Comments

Offshoring.

[sethstorm]

Johnny can code, just that there's too much against Johhny to make him want to do so.

Get rid of offshoring, and Johnny will want to code.

Re:Offshoring.

[Anonymous Coward]

Middle school and high school students haven't had to fret about offshoring, I doubt that's a factor...

I think the big difference is, people in the industry (even young people, shortly out of college) grew up with (at minimum, if not earlier systems) DOS based systems, Windows 3.1, IRC chat client's etc. "Back in the day" anyone interested in using their computer for something useful had to learn to do it themselves, and tinker, and become interested in expanding their ability to make their computer do what they want.

Now, before they can walk, they have 3D games, music players, Facebook and all other forms of social media. I'm not saying it's all bad, but, where is the drive to get someone young interested in computing? To them, using a computer is playing a game, or reading Facebook. Not writing a script for mIRC to scrape text for keywords and have your bot auto respond to people, because that's what used to be fun.. 10+ years ago..

Re:Offshoring.

[Daetrin]

Get rid of offshoring, and Johnny will want to code.

I'm pretty sure "Johnny" isn't considering international trade relations and the resulting corporate offshoring when deciding what to do with his free time and/or study time. I certainly didn't give any kind of thought to that thing when i was a kid, and i expect the usual answers of "what do you want to be when you grow up" are based far more on what that individual finds cool than on a coldhearted analysis of future earning potential. By the time they reach middle school i expect most people are barely starting to get out of that mindset.

Re:Offshoring.

[Kagetsuki]

Bullshit. Jina can code just as well as Johnny if not better, and he doesn't have the elitist "I'm always right because I studied design theory for four years" attitude. That's the problem.

I had played around with coding myself, but really learned first at Stanford. The thing is after returning to Japan I went to a specialty school that didn't even have an entrance exam - anyone can attend, and had to re-learn everything during the first year. I thought this would be worthless, but I quickly found out I had been taught how to code very poorly. You could easily draw parallels from programming education to math education in America vs math education in Japan or India.

I'm sure I'll get marked flamebait for all of this, but from my personal experiences both learning to code and working with other coders from America, Japan, and India I can tell you I'd probably never choose to partner with an American coder over an Indian or Japanese. Drop the attitudes and learn from those who in reality are doing it better than you.

Re:Offshoring.

[sethstorm]

He is, just that he isn't paying attention in the way you might think. While we might see trade relations, he might see it in his parents losing a college-paying job from it, a relative experiencing the same, or perhaps the news.

He is brighter than you might think.

Re:Offshoring.

[RazzleFrog]

Protectionism never works. It's a global market and you can't go back now. If you want Johnny to not lose his job to Jhoni than he better learn some value added skills.

Re:Offshoring.

[MBCook]

...but I quickly found out I had been taught how to code very poorly.

Can you explain what you were taught incorrectly (or just weren't taught)? I'm curious what the issues were.

Re:Offshoring.

[RazzleFrog]

So tell me how you "kill" offshoring? I'm curious what you magic antidote is to prevent companies from operating in a cost-efficient manner.

Re:Offshoring.

[bluefoxlucid]

Why should everyone in the US be a computer programmer? It makes no sense. Who cares? I want automechanics and skilled artisans, not programmers; we have enough programmers, and the steady spiral downward might be because they're rolling out of college and taking up beggary due to the lack of programming jobs.

Stupid single-minded one-dimensional gits trying to "fix" education...

Re:Offshoring.

[Grishnakh]

It depends on his parents. If his dad's a software engineer, he probably told little Johnny to find something else to do for work because his job was sent to India.

Re:Offshoring.

[betterunixthanunix]

Get rid of offshoring, and Johnny will want to code.

You make programming sound like some kind of a chore, a typical day job that someone is only going to do because they are paid to do it. I am sure that such programmers exist, but the best programmers out there are the ones for whom programming is as natural as breathing, who would be hacking even if they were unemployed, and who are enjoy the work that they do. This is not terribly different than the situation with mathematicians -- the best mathematicians are the ones who love math.

America has a lot of trouble teaching math to middle school and high school students, at least by comparison with other countries. It should come as no surprise that we have trouble teaching computer programming, which is very close to mathematics. It also doesn't help that we have a mass media that portrays computer programmers as these nerdy anti-social types (yes they sometimes become rich, but we glamorize people who were born into wealth).

Re:Offshoring.

[Octorian]

And the current trend in computing devices is one from where the normal consumer device could be tinkered with, to where the normal consumer device is forbidden from being tinkered with. Its only a matter of time before you'll need a special "development system" to do any tinkering at all. Of course there are many in our age group who may not see this as a problem, because *they* would get such a system, and *normal* people don't need one anyways.

And you know how likely it is for a middle-schooler to actually have access to such a system? Especially when the parents aren't tinkerers themselves? Practically zip!

Think about it.

Re:Offshoring.

[jesseck]

Middle school and high school students haven't had to fret about offshoring, I doubt that's a factor...

It's still a factor, high school students are going to be concerned about what college to attend and their future employment. Middle school students, not so much, but at that point in their lives the children's parents will influence what happens. And parents will see offshoring as a threat.

Personally, I encourage my 3rd grader to learn programming- things like logic and operators are fun. Especially when we can sit down and work through a problem, all skills that easily translate into a scripting language in the future.

Re:Offshoring.

[scottbomb]

Or maybe you're just getting started and NO ONE will even look at you unless you've got 3-5 years of professional experience.

Re:Offshoring.

[mbkennel]

You mean like the large across-the-board tariff that China has employed via currency manipulation for the last 25 years?

Yes, it has clearly destroyed their industrial base and damaged their standard of living.

Re:Offshoring.

[stinkyj]

I tend to agree. It's all about economics. Last year I went to Romania and India for work. From what I can see, the only difference between them and the USA coders are costs. They have good, bad, and lazy coders just like we do. I saw an Indian girl playing bejeweled all afternoon, and a Bucharest girl instant messaging constantly(no it wasn't part of the job). So I tell my kids don't be try computers, it's too difficult to try and compete against a business case of money. Offshoring is alive and well, it has slowed due to economics, but the sheer number of big corporation buildings going up in India is incredible.

Re:Offshoring.

[anyGould]

So tell me how you "kill" offshoring? I'm curious what you magic antidote is to prevent companies from operating in a cost-efficient manner.

Easy - remove the loopholes that make it cost-efficient for companies to offshore.

This doesn't mean protectionism - just closing the rules that allow companies to shift their revenues and losses between tax districts will do wonders to encourage companies to work in house.

Re:Offshoring.

[BigDaveyL]

Quoting from your post:
"Even WITH offshoring Software Engineering is one of the ONLY segments of the US economy that is still hiring and has a serious shortage of qualified people."

I think you need some additional quantifiers here - employers set the bar high and don't want to pay for a rockstar. There will always be a shortage of the super highly skilled/niche programmers, and these people will easily find jobs because of their highly skilled/niche status.

Also, employers are unwilling to recognize transferrable skills and adverse to having promotions/employee development. For example, I know people that are stuck programming VB 6 because their employer doesn't want to upgrade to the new fangled .Net stuff. When employees want to look for a new job, they are told "Sorry, you don't have .Net exp." so they are stuck supporting crappy apps, even though they could be an above average programmer.

I also thought I read somewhere that colleges and universities are graduating enough people in computing related fields to fill computing related jobs. If this is true, then the shortage is less of an issue.

So in conclusion, there is only a shortage of people that are highly skilled and have real world exp. in what you're specifically looking for, and willing to accept your pay. All others need not apply.

Re:Offshoring.

[scruffy]

And the current trend in computing devices is one from where the normal consumer device could be tinkered with, to where the normal consumer device is forbidden from being tinkered with.

There are a couple other trends that make it more difficult for learning computer programming.

Even if it's not forbidden, it's very difficult to tinker with any number of devices. When I was a kid, it was useful to spend some effort to take a device apart, figure out what was wrong, replace or juryrig some part, and put it back together again (sounds like programming, doesn't it). Nowadays, you need special tools and even if you get it apart, there's not much that you can tinker with.

Another trend is that math in schools depends more and more on using calculators rather than manually applying an algorithm to add, multiply, whatever. This might be ok for math, but students lose out on problem solving skills.

Overall, there are a number of factors that result in kids not having to learn problem solving skills that come in handy for computer programming. You could include following recipes in a cookbook, making up games and arguing about the rules, sewing, fishing, wandering around by yourself and finding your way back. Kids hardly do any stuff that involves real-world planning, execution, and debugging. No, a video game does not suffice for this (at least not so far).

The result is that college instructors (such as yours truly at an average college) end up with students that are essentially clueless about putting one step after another. Because the students have not been exposed to this, they are crippled when it comes to doing programming for the first time, and only a lucky few make it through the first few courses.

Re:Offshoring.

[rezalas]

The "serious shortage of qualified people" is mostly the fault of the companies themselves. Businesses want to pay pennies and earn dollars when it comes to developers, and they only want to hire the absolute "creme of the crop". Also it is not that there are only a handful of rockstar programmers, but simply a lack of opportunity for programmers to become highly skilled. It is difficult to work a job, go to school, and then find time to become some sort of master coder in the small amount of time you have left to sleep / eat / avoid divorce. Businesses want pre-packaged master programmers with a decade of experience and two degrees, and they want to pay $50,000 a year with meager benefits to match. If they set the bar lower and actually hired college graduates with little experience for a decent wage they might find that the average person can learn to become what you need them to (in this example, an amazing programmer). But when you go looking for a job all you find are "Sr. .NET Developer, minimum 10+ years experience" and you rarely (maybe 1 a month) find "Entry level .NET programmer, Bachelors or 2-4 years experience". Everyone has to start somewhere, but they never become masters when you fail to give them a chance.

Re:Offshoring.

[Kagetsuki]

No, I took programming classes at Stanford, and then I studied at HAL in Japan. The difference was very much the same as the difference between education in mathematics between American and Japan, both I have experienced. Americans just seem to jumble concepts together in some sort of linear path where to get from point A to C you absolutely must learn point B before C and after A.

For example, in mathematics in America you learn different equations for a line in different mathematical styles - algebra, geometry, etc. In Japan we learn all the equations for lines together at the same time. For programming in America you'll learn some method and then learn several algorithms that employ that method (learn loops and conditionals, then learn different types of sorts). In Japan we learned computing architecture including how things were stored in memory and collected and processed by the CPU, stored in the registers etc. while also learning assembler, doing algorithms with flow charts, and learning C. By learning all that in parallel I understood how the code I wrote in C would look in ASM, and how the ASM would translate to a list of binary instructions stored in memory, and how those instructions in memory were composed and how they would be sent through the machine. I came out of the first year at Stanford roughly able to code, I came out of the first year of HAL with a complete understanding of how to implement complex algorithms in C and how the compiled binary output of that C code would be processed by the machine.

Certainly different schools will teach differently, but it seems to me the general methodologies of teaching have different underlying paradigms. As for India, good schools in India are insanely difficult to get into because of limited space. To get into a good university in India the hurdles are significantly higher than those of say MIT. On top of that India has a very unique system of mathematics that can prove to be extremely impressive. Calculation code I would have to write down and spend time converting, breaking down and checking I have seen my Indian counterparts glance at and find errors in seconds. Certainly the Indian coders I have worked with would be the higher-level ones; the ones that have made it to Japan. By the same token I've yet to see an American that worked well in a group and didn't continually press their random ideas like they were be-all end-all solutions. Just personal experiences for sure, but if I were putting my own money down on foreign developers my past experiences would have an effect on my decisions.

Re:Offshoring.

[milimetric]

I'm going to call you out for racism. Generalizing something like the coding ability of the millions of coders in either Japan, India, or the US is ludicrous. Some people code well, some people don't. It has a little bit to do with education but mostly with passion and dedication. That can't really be taught and can develop in people at different times in their life. So I think as long as the education is somewhat adequate, the blame and glory of the results rests solely with the individual.

Re:Offshoring.

[Radres]

I call B.S. If anything, a computer science degree from a US university focuses on the general concepts behind computing to a fault. Perhaps more of what you're describing falls under computer engineering. At any rate, you could have learned those things from Stanford just as well as you did from Japan, or perhaps better. The remedial intro to programming course you took was probably intended to cover the kids who chose to major in CS without any real coding experience from high school.

Re:Offshoring.

[Grishnakh]

In Japan we learned computing architecture including how things were stored in memory and collected and processed by the CPU, stored in the registers etc. while also learning assembler, doing algorithms with flow charts, and learning C. By learning all that in parallel I understood how the code I wrote in C would look in ASM, and how the ASM would translate to a list of binary instructions stored in memory, and how those instructions in memory were composed and how they would be sent through the machine.

That sounds exactly like my university education here in the USA, at Virginia Tech. The thing is, I never took any Computer Science classes; my major was in Electrical Engineering.

If you want to learn low-level stuff like that, you have to go into EE or Computer Engineering, not CS.

if you're not interested in computers....

[Anonymous Coward]

no amount of coddling will make you a good programmer.

Re:if you're not interested in computers....

[Anrego]

A disturbing interest in the kind of things that put off the kids described in this article

There are exceptions, but most of the programmers I know (and myself), when first exposed to computers, immediately started wondering how they worked and how we could "make programs". If that curiosity and interest isn't automatic and you have to be "tricked" into it... in my opinion you'll probably be a bad programmer.

In other words ....

[tomhudson]

... it's designed to attract the types of students who are disinterested in, or don't have the mind-set for, "real programming".

That worked out real well for all those colleges that churn out useless web monkeys - but not so well for the unemployable students going around with their "Certificate as a Webmaster's Assistant".

What next - "Programming by Powerpoint"? Oh wait ...

Re:In other words ....

[Rogerborg]

Not necessarily. Johnny could be a diamond in the rough, but thinks that programming is hard and pointless. By giving him a rewarding goal that shows results quickly, he might discover that he actually has a talent and a passion. It worked for me - I only learned to program so that I could hack Netrek, and now I do some fairly deep fu.

Remember, we're competing for Johnny's heart and mind. Would we rather that he became a lawyer, or an accountant?

Re:In other words ....

[Anubis IV]

If Johnny is young enough, I think it works. For instance, I didn't realize it until many, many years later, but the first programming I learned wasn't Java or C++ in high school, and it certainly wasn't one of the dozens of others I saw in college, but was rather Logo in elementary school. I recognize now that Logo actually was a big part of what got me interested in computers in the first place. I used to rush through the keyboarding exercises and other work we had in computer labs in 4th and 5th grade so that I could go back to "playing" with "that fun little turtle drawing program".

It wasn't until sometime in college that I remembered having played with Logo as a child, and realized that it had covered loops, functions, and other concepts in a way that seemed simple and natural at the time. It also explained why I jumped at the chance to learn programming when it was offered in high school.

We got in at a good time

[jaymz2k4]

I can't help but feel lucky to have met computers back in the 80's and to have spent my time using something "simple" like the C64 with BASIC and then moving up to PC's learning various languages and growing my interest more and more to then eventually be sat a linux workstation coding in Python for a living. Many of the ids I know through family no longer look at computers with the same sparkly or excitement of those early days.

I feel incredibly lucky to have got in at a point where I could experience relatively low spec & power computing and see it progress to the state it is today. I get the feeling that a lot of people getting into computers these days as kids don't get that sort of exposure and so don't get so bonded to learning about them. There was a good chance you could understand the schematic of a C64. Look at a die of a modern i7 and it's more modern art than anything that's going to make sense to a kid.

I definitely feel that in some way we lucked out in getting to experience computing the past 30 years.

Re:We got in at a good time

[jank1887]

my first program was when someone showed me you could type
10 print"butt"
20 goto 10

Type run and the teacher flips out because she doesn't know about the Break key. yes, she eventually just pulled the plug on the computer. next we learned the PLAY command, and the room was filled with ambulance wails. Some of us may have been temporarily banned from the computer lab.

But I learned how a program works. I made the computer do something using a total of 24 characters.

Low bar to entry, intuitive method for an absolute newbie. what's the modern day equivalent? "hold on Johnny, first you forgot to include all the right io headers..."

Re:Motivation

[geoffrobinson]

I understand your feelings. At the same time it sounds like someone learning chord progressions on the guitar and wondering how it was applicable to playing Led Zeppelin songs.

Don't cater

[clinko]

I Think the problem is that "Johnny" doesn't like programming. Why fix that?

The worst employee is a specialist that hates his specialty. He's only going to fight his way out of his job and defer to others. Why do you think there's usually more IT managers than Developers? :)

Re:Programmer vs Computer Scientist

[siride]

The poster made a mistake because of a homophone. Before you assume that he doesn't know the difference, consider that it may just be an honest mistake. I know the difference, for example, between "no" and "know", but when typing quickly, I might accidentally type the wrong one, and if I'm not careful, I won't go back and fix it. It doesn't mean I'm an idiot who doesn't know basic English. It just means I'm being careless. And for the commentary section on a second-rate news aggregator site, I don't think that's a big deal.

Teaching

[Aladrin]

It has been my experience that walking a student through making something simple will widen their eyes considerably. This usually means something like an easy game where they can visually see the results of their work. Games that can be modified easily are even better, because they -will- play with the code and try to improve it for their own tastes.

On the other hand, teaching them to write a linked list is mind-numbingly boring for someone who can't imagine why they'd want such a thing.

Getting people interested in programmer is mostly about giving them the right exposure at the start.

This course sounds like it at least is headed the right direction.

Re:Its not the icky?

[Moryath]

just like normal people aren't clever enough to use Linux (hence it's low market share)

Uhm... try that one again.
Most people don't use Linux because:
- The support for it is limited to forums where you never get actual help, but instead a bunch of ass-hats who shout back "RTFM LAMZOR" and similar insults at you. If you write in to a bug report forum or a feature request to some bit of software, someone screaming "the beauty of it is its linux so you can fix it yourself so go fix it yourself and post the fix noob" is not comforting or likely to make you stick around.

- Most of the programs they are looking to run, don't run on Linux (games industry, sadly, used to be a lot better but has backslid over the years considerably).

- The "open source alternatives" to many of the programs they run, have problems with shifting crap around on them for poorly documented reasons.

- You don't just "switch to linux." You have to pick one of a gazillion discordant distros, or else fuck around trying out every goddamn one for six months to settle on the one you like and HOPE that it remains updated and supported thereafter. And that they don't fuck with you in the next release, like Ubuntu just did forcing this crap "Unity" interface. And that the architecture for your particular distro isn't rewritten in some bizarre-ass fucking arcane way that causes your particular hardware to break on the "standard linux driver"... presuming one even exists.

I won't say that there aren't very intelligent people using Linux - there obviously are. But it has become very obvious to me over the past 15 years that the people programming Linux, the people designing interfaces for Linux, and the people evangelizing Linux, have absolutely no goddamn fucking clue what a normal desktop user wants, needs, or what will appeal to same. I refer you to this insightful post from someone who also has spent plenty of time with Linux as well.

Re:Its not the icky?

[Grishnakh]

While I hate to jump to the defense of the masses, this is ridiculous. Normal people are certainly "clever enough" to use Linux. Lots of people on here, I'm sure, have wives or parents who use Linux; my wife does. It's no harder than using Windows, and in a lot of ways is quite a bit easier. Of course, as with the others with Linux-using relatives, I have to be the IT support person, but that's no different from Windows for most people: they outsource their IT support to either their kid, their nephew, or Geek Squad (I see them driving to peoples' homes in subdivisions here all the time) or some other "computer repair" business. Luckily, Linux doesn't have problems nearly as much as Windows, but things happen sometimes, or they need help finding a certain application to do something.

Now granted, these Linux users aren't working at the command line, writing bash or Perl scripts, and certainly not full-blown C++ applications, nor are they compiling their own kernel. But they're still using Linux, even if all they do is use Firefox and OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

As for kids doing programming, you're half right. It's not that they aren't clever enough: most programming really isn't that hard, and anyone with half a brain who applies themselves can write simple programs in Java or Perl or Python or whatever if they really want to. But just like doing automotive repair work or woodworking, you have to want to do it, and take time to learn it. Most people aren't interested, and would rather take their car to a mechanic, buy their furniture pre-made (even if it is shitty particle board with fake-looking veneer), or buy a pre-made application or hire someone to do something custom (or just do without).

Just like other professions, programming takes a lot of time to learn and master, and even more time to keep up with because it's constantly changing (e.g., 5 years ago Perl was still pretty popular, but these days everyone seems to be using Python for that stuff now, and only the diehard Perl fans still use it; C++ just released a totally new revision with all kinds of changes). The big question is: why is there SO much of a push by educators to get kids to take up programming? Why not push them to take up auto mechanics, so they can fix their own cars and save money? Why not push them to learn woodworking, which they used to do decades ago in schools? Why not push them to learn about law, since we can never have enough lawyers (sarc.)? It's probably because there's a bunch of tech companies in this country that want a larger pool of workers so they can pay less. The worst part is that they're trying to get these poor kids interested in programming games. Everyone here should know by know how bad the working conditions are at EA and the other game makers, because they rely on a constant stream of bright-eyed college grads who are all excited by being a "games programmer" that they can take advantage of and overwork until they're totally burned out; it's absolutely the worst part of the software field. I'm sure they never tell these schoolkids about this.

Re:Motivation

[wed128]

This.

A lot of people taking computer science in college and wondering why they're not learning how to do ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio belong in a Tech School. The world needs bottom level implementers just like it needs ditch diggers.

University level computer science is about Design, not Implementation.

Wow, your contempt for the US shows quite well.

[sethstorm]

Except that Jina only is coding because of anti-US fraud that works in her favor.

Sounds like you don't want a US citizen until they've been beat down to a level of world subservience. Another point to add - you weren't paying attention that we're not asking about Jina, just Johnny.

We need less of you, less of Jina, and to give every advantage to Johnny.

I love linux, but I don't recommend it.

[p4nther2004]

(BTW: Unity sucks and you can go backward, I did.)

Anyway, ...back to your argument:

"absolutely no goddamn fucking clue what a normal desktop user wants, needs, or what will appeal to same.'

I love linux, but I never^H^H^H^H^Hrarely recommend it.

If you like Windows...USE it. Why would you go to Linux? I tell people Linux is harder to use, flat out.

And then people either shutup about it...or they ask me WHY I use it. Oh, then it gets interesting. I explain, that, for a programmer, Linux represents probably the best choice as a platform. Endless programming language, databases, web servers, browsers, etc. More tools I can shake a stick at. All free!

But most people aren't interested in that. Like you pointed out, they want to run Microsoft Office, play games, etc. That's fine, run Windows.

So, we'll never have a Linux desktop? Cough. Most people have USED linux at one point or another. How many appliances use linux? How many tablets, smart phones, routers, etc are using it? People use it all the time....but it's not a Linux "Desktop"

The reason for that is simple. A Desktop for people is "Running Microsoft Office, playing games, etc."

Linux is bigger than that.

I'm interested too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not good engough to say X is bad and then don't bother to explain what is wrong. How are things going to get better otherwise?

Re:Wrong!

[Grishnakh]

I object to having to pay support to report a vendor's bugs to them.

You might, but apparently there's plenty of genius MBAs running companies out there who don't mind paying giant maintenance fees for the privilege of reporting a vendor's bugs to them and hoping they get fixed.

Johnny (Ivan) can't code because of C(++)

[A Friendly Troll]

Well, at least it's like that where I live.

See, ages ago, we had kids being taught LOGO and BASIC. That worked splendidly. Write some stuff, see a turtle draw, or make an infinite '10 print "hello": 20 goto 10' loop.

Then came along Pascal, usually in high school, although it wasn't unheard of to see it in the final levels of elementary school. It was a bit more of a nuisance, with all the begins and ends, and the semicolons too, but it was still somewhat manageable for the kids.

But then someone had a serious brainfart and decided that kids be "taught" C and even C++. Suddenly there were all these strange symbols ("teacher, why is 'and' called '&&' here and why and how is '&&' different than '&'?") and stdio.h includes and god damn pointers, which extremely few children managed to grasp because they had no idea how memory and processors work. No, they were supposed to learn what a keyboard is, then how to translate a number into binary/hexadecimal and back, and then they were immediately thrown into curly braces and pointer hell.

I have no idea what it's like in the USA, but over here it fucked up everything. If you make it hard for the kids and drown them in hardcore idiocy to the point of them being sickened by IT classes, then you can't expect that they learn how to code.

Me? I started with BASIC on the ZX Spectrum in the early eighties. Had the Speccy had something more difficult, I'd have been a librarian right now.

Re:Its not the icky?

[element-o.p.]

Bovine Scatology (that's B.S. for short).

I have a part-time job working with kids between 6th grade and 8th grade, and I'm continually amazed at how clever and intelligent every single one of them can be...if you can find a way to motivate them to make the effort. I also used to work as a flight instructor, so I have first-hand experience teaching, too. I've had students that I was certain were either deliberately trying to kill me in the airplane or else were so uncoordinated that they would never be able to fly. One of those students ended up becoming one of my best students, once I figured out how to communicate flying concepts to him in a way he could understand.

Saying "normal people aren't clever enough to program" is a cop out. If a teacher can't motivate the student to make the effort to learn to program or can't communicate in a variety of styles so that people of all learning types can get that "Aha!" moment when it finally begins to make sense, it's a failure of the teacher. Here's a tip for you, though: if you're so insecure that the thought of "the masses" learning to code scares you, then you probably aren't one of the top 10%, either.

Re:Its not the icky?

[Opportunist]

Sorry, but there are coders and there are programmers.

You can teach a person to write code. It's not rocket science. Especially with today's RAD tools, intimate knowledge of anything isn't really a requirement anymore. And since pretty much every problem you might usually have in everyday programming has been solved already, copy/paste programming has become a staple of the industry.

That doesn't mean that these people really know what they're really doing.

I don't know if you ever had to take over legacy code from someone. Often you find out that he has been fired with good reason. There's a lot of voodoo programming going on, with people filling their programs with a lot of code that makes no sense whatsoever, but it was in the snippet they copied (where the code might even have done something meaningful).

So please, don't think that just 'cause a lot of people are "writing code" today that they actually know what they're doing. There's a lot of cookbook coders out there.

You're so 1990s...

[mangu]

- The support for it is limited to forums where you never get actual help, but instead a bunch of ass-hats who shout back "RTFM LAMZOR" and similar insults at you

As opposed to forums about windows where you are always sure to get helpful professional advice?

If you write in to a bug report forum or a feature request to some bit of software, someone screaming "the beauty of it is its linux so you can fix it yourself so go fix it yourself and post the fix noob" is not comforting or likely to make you stick around.

Have you ever tried sending a bug report to Microsoft? I have and, believe me, I'd rather be called "noob" than get the response I did:

-"We are aware of that situation and it will be fixed in the next version"
-"Oh, great! And when will you send me the next version?
-"It will be available next spring for $"599.95"

- You don't just "switch to linux." You have to pick one of a gazillion discordant distros

Yeah, like Linux Starter, Linux Home, Linux Professional, or Linux Ultimate, right?

And that the architecture for your particular distro isn't rewritten in some bizarre-ass fucking arcane way that causes your particular hardware to break on the "standard linux driver"... presuming one even exists.

That reminds me of the last time someone asked me for help installing his new printer in his dual-boot computer. He had already installed the drivers for Windows that came in the CD. I asked "have you tried printing something in Linux?" He hadn't. When he did the printer just worked in Linux, differently from Windows, there was no need to run any install programs.

But it has become very obvious to me over the past 15 years

Admit it, you haven't actually tried to run Linux in the last 15 years, have you? Because your comments are exactly the way I felt in 1995 when I first installed Yggdrasil Linux in my computer.

I refer you to this insightful post from someone who also has spent plenty of time with Linux as well.M

I found this "insightful" pearl in that link: "I want to use Notepad++; it lacks a Linux port.". That's like saying "I want to eat pig shit and can't find it in this fancy restaurant's menu".

Re:Its not the icky?

[SenseiLeNoir]

Well, when I was a teacher, (and even now in my professional life), I used to ask everyone a simple question.

"What is the difference between a Programmer, a Software Engineer, and a Hacker?"

To which i give the answer:
"When presented with a square hole and a round peg and told to integrate: The programmer will say, it cannot be done. The Engineer will re-engineer the hole and/or the peg in order to fit properly, the Hacker does the same, but with a Hammer."

However, in any real project (especially agile) you need people with all three mentalities. You need the developers to code the menial stuff, allowing the engineers to focus on the more chalenging aspects, and sometimes you need the hacker mentality to meet a particular deadline, as long as you have a long term plan to refactor that code later.