Slashdot Mirror
Should Everybody Learn To Code?
theodp writes "In July, the Association for Computing Machinery announced it was partnering with Code.org, with ACM contributing funding and its Director of Public Policy to Code.org in a push to 'ensure that every K-12 student in the US has the opportunity to study computer science.' Interestingly, joining others questioning the conventional Presidential wisdom that everybody-must-get-code is the Communications of the ACM, which asks in its February issue, Should Everybody Learn to Code? By the way, Code.org is bringing its Hour of Code show to the UK in March. The new National Curriculum for England that is to be taught in all primary and secondary schools beginning in September includes a new emphasis on Computer Science curricula, said to have been sparked by a speech given by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt in 2011."
Sure, why not. They'll never use it anyway.
No.
ensure that every K-12 student in the US has the opportunity to study computer science
Yes.
(1) Reading comprehension
(2) Household economics
then Coding.
Everyone thinks that their profession is the most important in the world. But making everyone a programmer is not the most important task.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Correct. We should start with learning to read/write before we move on to the advanced stuff.
No sig today...
The question brought to mind a nice quote by Oscar Wilde: "A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten some". Coding is not for everyone. Neither are history, poetry, chemistry, or Latin for that matter. But it's important enough to be included in a broad curriculum. Show your children everything, and they'll choose the stuff that is of interest to them.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"The question brought to mind a nice quote by Oscar Wilde: "A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten some"."
Absolutly right and, probably, in the same sense as Wilde tried to transmit.
Should everybody learn to code? Absolutly not.
Should everybody learn to think rationaly, not to be fooled by appearances, find the nut of a problem and then be able to decompose it into action items, set a path of action to solve them and finally check the intended result with the obtained one? I think so.
And it happens tom that learn to code can be a fantastic tool, probably the best, to achieve that goal.
And it's a lot more fun than MS vs Linux, Java vs .NET, Nvidia vs AMD, or even vi vs emacs. Sorry "gcc or llvm", your grudge match will have to settle for a 3 AM slot on a low budget, obscure science light cable TV channel.
The big language demolition derby is still hot and furious, like the annual playoffs of old sports that still excite fans, if you can see past all the smoking wrecks like Modula and the entire team of modular programming cluttering the arena. If only the Perl 6 team could sort out their engine troubles and get their car into the arena, replace that sputtering Perl 5 vehicle and challenge that JavaScript/CSS/HTML/AJAX monstrousity that was cobbled together from a dozen different brands of automobiles, and that C++ bug that still works after being run over and rolled over and which just got a fresh set of wheels. OOP sponsors must be wondering which teams are still proud to bear their logos. And where's Haskell? Oh yes, loudly honking their horns from atop the safety of their functional programming pedestal while the LISP car circles round and round as if they expect a ramp to appear at any moment. Python? Dancing around the LAMP pole with PHP's go-kart. In one of the darker corners of the arena are the excruciatingly slow horse drawn wagons of the Fortran and Cobol teams, just trying to hold their ground. Follow the oil slick to find C. Java is struggling to move under the crushing weight of their massive armor, spare parts, and the huge gas tanks needed to feed their too thirsty engine. The kids would still love those Logo toy cars they used to hand out last century.
If coding is so universal, what language should everyone learn? We're nowhere near sorting that out. Shouldn't we be able to settle and standardize on the essential elements of a programming language? As it is, it's like arguments over mathematical notation. Multiplication works the same whether the symbol used is x or * or a dot or nothing at all because it's the default operation. But it's not so easy to tell what is trivial and what is important in programming languages.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Though for me Logic 101 was a lot better for my thinking than learning to code.
FYI I'm the OP.
"You see, "lists" and "arrays" are words from common language because lists and arrays in programing are exactly that: lists and arrays."
Did this make sense to you when you wrote it? Read it again.
I realize that lists and arrays make perfect sense to you (and they do to me now too), but in the beginning when I was reading books on how to do all of this stuff, it was NOT intuitive to me. I would propose that it is only intuitive to a small subset of the population.
" what it means is that you are not properly prepared to understand the world around you and your education has made of you a gullible person easier to fool than it should be."
You are going to need to provide more evidence of this than you have. I understand all of those concepts NOW-- I do not think they have aided my critical thinking in other areas all that much. I would also argue that you are terrible at making your case, because you basically state your conclusion, then use it as a premise to back up your argument.
"Do you think being a salesman is an easy task? "
I was a "nerd" growing up, and am somewhat of a hybrid sales person/tech guy. I used to dismiss sales, but actually your response to me is indicative of why orgs like mine need sales people. You come off brash and insensitive, without even meaning to. You instantly put people on the defensive and even if you're technically correct (which you've also failed to demonstrate it), you lose your chance to demonstrate that with your tone.
So we're clear you're pretty common in that regard. It's a common trait among engineers/the technically minded.
They don't need to code. They need an IT department that doesn't have its head in its ass and is supplied with enough resources to be able to afford solving user problems like that.
Yes... but the other piece of the puzzle is that the user has to be computer-savvy enough to know, or at least suspect, that there is a better way to accomplish a task. Users who have very narrow IT training may think there is only one way to do a task, and may not bother to ask for help because they don't even know that an alternative exists. Only people with slightly broader training will even be aware that there are things like scripts that can automate tedious processes.
Yes... but the other piece of the puzzle is that the user has to be computer-savvy enough to know, or at least suspect, that there is a better way to accomplish a task.
At last, the real value in this rather silly education push. No, most people are not going to actually learn how to code, even if they take a class with the ostensible purpose of learning. But they will, at least, get a grasp on what's possible. It's amazing to me, after 20 years of so-called Information Age, exactly how few people have this basic grasp. It's just not there. The possibility that the machine can do repetitious things for them never crosses most people's minds. People think what they want done can't be automated because one part is unique each time, if they even give any consideration to the possibility of automation at all.
Primary school is about teaching people the basics, numeracy and literacy. Secondary school is as much about about teaching people what's possible as it is teaching any particular thing, and in this day and age, learning what a computer can do is at least as important at learning what chemistry can do.
I disagree wholeheartedly that learning to code is too specialized. We're in a transitional period right now where people specializing in computers are the ones writing code, but once society commits to the information economy fully, we'll start to see domain experts writing code for their domain rather than computer experts having to learn the domain (or collaborating with domain experts) to write the code.
It's analogous to basic literacy. There was a time when specialists in various professions would seek out someone literate to do their reading and writing for them. Now, it's an expected skill for everyone to have. We're in that period for computer literacy. Eventually, everyone will be expected to write enough code to solve the problems they specialize in. There will always be computer specialists...the people who build the tools that everyone uses or people who's jobs require a higher standard of code. But we have that exact same situation today...journalists, writers, lawyers and many other professions are expected to have a higher level of proficiency with reading and writing.
It's imperative that people understand this. We're entering a period where more and more people aren't able to offer any greater utility than machines, be they robots or simple software. First it was basic arithmetic where computers exceeded humans. Over time, we've added the bulk of our assembly line work. Even advanced tasks like playing chess are now best performed by computers. Google and others proving that human drivers will eventually be replaced. We'll soon realize that almost every job that doesn't involve some degree of creativity is on that list. Learning to code will be the primary defense against being replaced in your work by a machine.