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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."
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"
And therein lies the... I don't want to say problem, but I cannot think of a better word.
When you see "learn to be a plumber", you think the simple stuff. Others may think more complex stuff, like soldering copper pipes, determining the correct angle of decline for waste pipes, repacking a shutoff valve, and other things that, not being a plumber myself, I do not have the knowledge to even consider as something a plumber would do.
Likewise, when people see "learn to code", some will think simple things like.. I don't know, how to grep a directory of text files. But others will think things like how to write an OS.
Or for the car analogy, it's the difference between knowing basic maintenance and being a full-blown mechanic.
Thus, we should say basic knowledge or advanced knowledge (basic maintenance vs full-blown mechanic). Everyone would probably benefit from basic knowledge on a number of things in today's world/civilization. Not everyone will benefit from advanced knowledge.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
Though for me Logic 101 was a lot better for my thinking than learning to code.
All right, but let's expand that a bit. Should every engineer know calculus?
Yes, every Engineer should know Calculus. This is different from what's in the subject "Re:Should Everybody Learn Calculus?".
Now what someone could ask without such an extreme bias is "Should every student in high school learn what calculus is and what you can use it for?" to which the answer would be "yes".
Learning "Calculus" requires a lot of precursory work which people in general don't in High School. A person could even ask "Should everyone learn the basics of Algebra, Geometry, and Trig to which that answer would also be "yes".
I'm not saying you introduced the bias, the AC did.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Being able to do calculus helps you think critically and serves as a basis for study in many other important fields. There's a pattern of reasoning skills that you develop when you read a book, learn a method, apply it to solve a problem, verify your answer, and return to the problem to identify and correct errors.
Being able to solve the problem without having to look it up gives you an intuition for solving complex problems without having to resort to such means. If I tell you the derivative of a value is x^{-1}, you shouldn't need to look up that it varies logarithmically. And being able to solve the problem yourself is what gives you the faith in the solution being correct. You could always look up the wrong value from the table, or provide the wrong input to a compute engine (side rant: Mathematica syntax drives me bonkers). You should always have multiple ways of understanding and verifying your solutions because relying solely on existing tools to perform the work for you without understanding where they come from turns this process into a black box which you have to rely on purely out of faith; I would argue that this can be dangerous, especially for mission critical applications. For basic calculus, linear algebra and differential equations, which every college engineer is expected to understand, I don't think this is an unreasonable requirement.
Even while you yourself may have not been in a situation where you needed to understand these concepts, there are many fields in which being able to manipulate these equations is important: particle advection, comupter graphics and animation engines (manipulating ODEs and PDEs, linear algebra), or scientific and numerical computing and modeling (pretty much anything field of math). So I would say, if I were developing a comprehensive computer science program, I absolutely would have to include this in my curriculum, otherwise I would be shutting our students out of these fields. And if you're a mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc. engineer (or you're any other kind of engineer having to work with them), you need to understand these concepts to have faith in your results.
The purpose of your college program was not to cater its curriculum directly to you, but to give all the students enrolled a broad set of skills that they could apply in situations that might arise. And understand that your program can only expose you to the skills that you should learn, but it's up to you to find a practical use for them.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.