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Non-Coders As the Face of the Learn-to-Code Movements
theodp writes "You wouldn't select Linus Torvalds to be the public face for the 'Year of Basketball.' So, why tap someone who doesn't code to be the face of 'The Year of Code'? Slate's Lily Hay Newman reports on the UK's Year of Code initiative to promote interest in programming and train teachers, which launched last week with a Director who freely admits that she doesn't know how to code. "I'm going to put my cards on the table," Lottie Dexter told Newsnight host Jeremy Paxman on national TV. I've committed this year to learning to code...so over this year I'm going to see exactly what I can achieve. So who knows, I might be the next Zuckerberg." "You can always dream," quipped the curmudgeonly Paxman, who was also unimpressed with Dexter's argument that the national initiative could teach people to make virtual birthday cards, an example straight out of Mark Zuckerberg's Hour of Code playbook (coming soon to the UK). Back in the States, YouTube chief and Hour of Code headliner Susan Wojcicki — one of many non-coder Code.org spokespersons — can be seen on YouTube fumbling for words to answer a little girl's straightforward question, "What is one way you apply Computer Science to your job at Google?". While it's understandable that companies and tech leaders probably couldn't make CS education "an issue like climate change" (for better or worse) without embracing politicians and celebrities, it'd be nice if they'd at least showcase a few more real-life coders in their campaigns."
Actually, yes I expect most of them to have nothing to do with the actual endeavor involved.
It's very rare for the President of the Hair Club for men to be in the advertising.
Writing, reading and arithmetic. Then how do you organize a task, a problem. Define what you have, define the goal, investigate what help you can get from tools/people & then define a plan which might get you to the goal. School doesn't tend to teach how to solve problems or tasks early on, but they can do that.
Of course I'm not.
But seriously, am I the only one who doesn't give a shit?
Look, don't code. Don't encourage your kids or students to code. It'll make those who do more valuable. Do mechanics worry about everyone on the planet knowing how to fix their car? Do carpenters spend countless hours navel-gazing about bringing carpentry to school children and girls and the average CEO? Do HVAC specialists?
Do whatever the hell you want to do. The fewer who want to code, the better for the negotiating power and leverage of coders and technologists going into the future.
It's like literacy or numeracy or basic understanding of science. You have a problem as a culture if it is culturally acceptable to say "I can't do math" or "I can't understand written language" or "I have no idea about the universe around me or how people go about understanding it" or "I can't read or write logical directions."
Do you expect everyone to be a best-selling novelist (or a writer that is enjoyed for all history?) No.
Do you expect everyone to be the next Ramanujan? No.
Do you expect everyone to be the next Knuth? No.
But it is expected that everyone have basic skills in these kinds of things. It's just necessary to understand the world. If you don't understand these kinds of things -- if you don't have basic skills in language or mathematics or logic -- then you are at a disadvantage in modern society.
I group computer science'logic here separate from Mathematics. Perhaps it shouldn't be. But having a population that doesn't understand things like this shuold be considered as problematic as a population that can not read and write.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I would hate to live in the world that so many or /. readers seem to live, in which only people who know how to do something can do it, or where coding is a magic that must be protected from the masses. When I learned coding my parents did not know if it would good or bad because few people could do it, but in middle school I was sat down at a teletype machine for an hour a day to learn. I high school I sat down at a terminal and learned to code for real. This taught me problem solving, algebra, trigonometry, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I would haven't learned as well otherwise. Which is beside the point, as coding itself, like reading, writing, and maths has value
I must also mention that I was fortunate because I had teachers who actually knew programming as work skill, one from IBM, so I was not learning it as wrote, but as craft. There were no tests to pass, other than being able to create a product.
And really teaching to code is not that hard, at least if you are not worried about tests and objectives and things that generally ruin the educational environment. A few summers ago I taught a group of kids, 12-17 years old, how to make an online application in Python, using nothing but a terminal application and online account, creating one sub-domain for each student.
So I don't care how is encouraging kids to code. i don't care if they are going to fail every test that comes out. All I would want to do is expose every student to a method of problems solving, let them go through some activities that doesn't involving copying code snippets to make a robot move, and allowing them to have some success and build confidence in them selves. Not a test, not a competition, not a game, just good old fashion legitimate problem solving.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Has never stopped him from being an opinionated (if misinformed) spokesman on subject. Google "Linus Torvalds" and "usability" for examples. So yes, I would expect Linus Torvalds to be a spokesman for NCAA basketball, basing his opinion on the strengths and weaknesses of the competing teams CS departments.
This all has a familiar feel to it.... What the big companies really want right now is cheap programmers, not more programmers. They're clearly hoping that increasing supply will lower their labor costs, whether it's by pushing the "year of code" or by increasing HB-1 visas.
Have you read my blog lately?
Someone looked up all the people who were on the committee of this Year of Code thing. Only three of 23 had a geeky coding background. The others were a bunch of entrepreneurs and startup-biz types.
Tom Morris blog
How many of them even know what 'github' is? Just a bunch of Nathan Barley types who got lucky. Although it doesn't mean the organisation would be any better if Nathan's programmer sidekick Pingu was on the committee.
See also
Adrian Short blog.
and see also all the episodes of Nathan Barley on YouTube if you've not seen it before.
inb4FuckBeta
Of course you can learn coding in a year. You'll not become a stellar coder. You might not even get recursion or pointers in that time frame. But you'll learn the fundamentals, and find out if you like it (in which case you'll continue to learn and get better by your own motivation) or don't (in which case you'll probably never achieve anything non-trivial in that field anyway and can safely omit learning more about it).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Introducing non-coders to coding ... it feels good ... it just does.
-kgj
With all due respect, if the folks who made Beta had learned to code, then maybe the world would be a better place.
Beta is not bad code. It is bad design.
The one BIG misunderstanding about coders that we are slave monkeys who only come out from under our rocks to air out. This comes from non-coders who DO NOT understand, not just coding but the science in general. Here's a question for those non-coders out there; who do you think taught US?! QA coder who must know how to talk to people. A coder who must know how to share that knowledge in a classroom context. No every coder is a natural born coder. But, there are those that have the ability to do it, and that can be taught. You know..it's so funny. Einstein was an eccentric, yet he was a superstar to the non-scientific community. Think about that....
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Working in the medical field, coders can be VERY dangerous. Improperly coded shit kills people all the time... Do you want that IV machine's program coded by an idiot?
I'd pay these sorts of concerns more credence, if the problem were universal and a large number of societies weren't punishing employers. But it's not. Instead, the problem of "useless people" really is a problem of the first world and some dysfunctional societies in the poorest parts of the world. Everyone else is hiring like crazy. Similarly, all sorts of costs and regulations have been added to the cost of an employee again in the same sort of societies that IMHO have "useless people".
As I see it, if the cost of employing you is larger than the value you can deliver through your labor, then you just became useless to an employer.
... I'm afraid. Only certain personal traits (such as good looks and charisma - no pun intended) are socially celebrated, while science and engineering talent are quite frankly milked and abused.
The UK turned its back on science and engineering back in the 1950s and embraced the arts (nothing wrong with that) and the cult of management instead. That tide has not turned; if anything it is getting worse.
When I joined the IEE (now IET) back in 1990 there was an assumption that everyone with an engineering degree would be in management by age 30. That's only 10 years (and not the best years) of engineering usefulness.
Now I see India making the exact same mistakes. We have to deal with 22 year old rookies who don't have the experience (I work in firmware with a strong analog emphasis) to deliver production code.
The interview was hilariously bad, but here's something interesting. Lottie is what, late 20s/early 30s? UK schools have had computers since the 1980s (and before for some places) & many schools did 'Computer studies' which included basic programming. On top of that we've had affordable home PCs for the best part of twenty years, broadband Internet for a decade, a 1980s computer literacy campaign, a 1990s Internet campaign, any bookshop full of programming tomes and YET... this lady can't code and clearly knows next to nothing about computers!???
In fact the whole language of this debate is moronic - what do they mean by 'code'? Programming? Putting together web-sites? Knocking up 'apps' using pre-programmed bits? Honestly, its like if we had an English literature promotion campaign and the boss went on TV saying 'Is important to read words'... 'what sort of words?'... 'Am not sure. Get back to me in 2015'...
Because it's not really about anyone learning to code. Doesn't seem to be, anyway.
It's about looking (and perhaps feeling) like you care about the "right" things. No need for actual code knowledge for that.
Because being able to use logic to write instructions that are correct and unambiguous is a skill that everyone should learn.
Coding isn't the only avenue for logical skills. There are off of the top of my head; philosophy, mathematical proofs, writing essays, writing cooking recipes, learning to play chess, and everything in basic sciences..
There are other avenues for intelligent and creative people than coding and coding is a relatively easy skill to pick up. I am unconvinced that coding adds anymore to a kid's education than reading, writing, mathematics and science. And the way things are in the US, teaching basic science should be a MUCH higher priority than computer science; let alone coding. Maybe if we pushed more of the basic sciences, we'd have less ignorant asses like Ken Ham and less people falling for his "beliefs".
What about being able to string a coherent sentence together, you fucking thick oaf?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
call themselves coders, so I see no problem with
Linus presenting himself as a basketball player.
I've got a book here, Electronic Computers Made Simple 1968 edition (yeah, you read that right) by Henry Jacobowitz. It's brilliant, there's an 'Introduction to the analogue computer' featuring a bit of calculus, some material on op-amps & servomechanisms, a chapter on number systems, one on Boolean algebra, a clear overview of transistors, digital electronics & how they fit together in gates, a look at programming (which to be fair doesn't feature any actual code though does describe techniques such as branching) and finally an end chapter promising that 'micro-miniaturization' will be the next big thing. It ends with the words 'The computer era has hardly begun'.
The book was aimed at self-learners and could be picked up in any book shop for a hefty 10s or around £7 in today's money.
Hence before most of us were born, and before you could get access to a working computer publishers were printing perfectly good educational guides for the (then) new technology that any working-class kid could study with a bit of effort.
Now we've got airheads on telly & dopy ad campaigns. Grim.
Dong Nguyen did. You don't have to be the next Brin or Linus. Being the next Nguyen would be more than enough for most of us. It certainly was more than enough for him.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Incompetent coders cost quite a lot of money. They take longer to get anything done (if they ever get it done), and the bugs they cause cost money for you and your clients, and harm your reputation among your clients, and they cost more money to fix, and so on. A team of incompetent coders will drive their employer right out of business.
So, I disagree that foisting coding skills on to people who aren't good at it will do them or anyone else any good.
As an aside, there are plenty of people who would be very competent food-growers, but who are unemployed, precisely because there is no market for food-growers. We produce so much food, in fact, that the government pays land owners to let their fields lie follow, actively blocking those who would happily work the fields for a wage. This is one example of a broad trend that produces the unemployment you are lamenting: the problem is not that most people can't do anything at all, the problem is that we simply don't need them to do anything.
You won't solve this problem by trying to impose a highly specialized and advanced skill set on to a population of people who have generally average abilities.
Feel free to try, though.
Excess coders are not something I worry about. Why? Same reason performing musicians don't worry about little Timmy tooting on a recorder in 2nd grade. Odds are Timmy will get frustrated just like I did when I tried to play that damned thing. Even if Timmy has "talent", odds are he won't be able to make money at it. Even if he makes money at it, odds are it won't hurt the other players.
I think coding is a lot like music in that regard. Fine, teach "coding appreciation" and have coding classes just like you have music appreciation and music classes. Most people will suck at it, only a few will make money, and of that subset only a few will be noteworthy.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That is pricesely the reason why we shouldnt invite everyone to learn a litle bit of coding. We dont invite everyone to build a little bit of bridges, just because it s so much fun, do we now?!
Btw, here are the missing symbols, fillem in as desired: 't''' (typing comments on a Galaxy Nexus 10 is no fun on /.)
Indeed. Yet curiously with CS and IS jobs people much rather pay an exorbitant amount to a business major to market a crapy product than to hire a competent CS major to create proper product that anyone can sell. After all selling is just a numbers game, put in a hundred to get 2, put in a thousnad to get 20.... Cant do that with coding, where paying one properly typically yields better results than paying ten poorly.
And sad at the same time. She has the looks though, can't argue that.
But the mindset that lead to the poor code being produced in the first place will also be unable see that the solution is to bring in a professional to do it right.
Non coders only see the physical component of coding and can't see anything else; just as if I watch a carpenter work, I won't recognise the skills applied there. Applied to management, they don't know that they don't know, and therefore use the only criteria they understand, which is price.
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Beta is not bad code. It is bad design.
It is unknown code and bad design, which is arguably worse.
"I might be the next Zuckerberg."
*pauses* you wouldn't want to do that..
And yet there was still the Therac-25 case where bad software design and a race condition leading to lethal radiation doses.
The people who designed the system and wrote the code may not have been idiots, but clearly problems made it through the testing process and killed three people (as well as affecting others).
Joe, try reading back your own sentences. They are sometimes incredibly hard to read. :) Add some punctuation there or break them down otherwise.
Care to give an example of what you mean??
Teach the teenagers G-Code. Give them 3-D printers. Reap lots of creativity, most of it indictable.
It's a marketing campaign. First and foremost, you would hope they know marketing. They can always have technical staff for the details. I'm pretty sure movie directors don't have the technical skills involved with the subject matter they are making a movie about.
Maybe it's a good thing to have somebody who isn't "in the field" trying to spark the interest of others. After all, most of the coders I know would not be good spokespersons to entice others to the field.
Beta is not bad code. It is bad design.
It is unknown code and bad design, which is arguably worse.
Actually, that is probably one of the reasons beta exists.
The old slashdot code is old and was apparently written by someone who no longer has anything to do with the site.
In light of this the current developers want to tear it all down and start again like a great many developers do in that situation. It is REALLY hard to maintain and extend a huge site, that was created by someone else, On top of it being difficult it is also not as much fun as creating something new from scratch. Then finally if you develop any website now you are more likely to do it using a bunch of webservices that either website or things like an iphone/andoid app can interact with.
I dont read
All these coding campaigns really piss me off. We should not be trying to teach kids how to write computer code. If people want to do it as a hobby—fine; if they want to get a real education and do it professionally—fine, but can we all stop pretending that everybody and their grandma needs to learn a programming language? They should learn something more useful instead, like how to communicate better, or more Math, or how to cook, or anything really. Programming was a major passion for me for almost a decade, and I still enjoy it, despite moving on to focus more on Math. I also think that a lot of us have an extremely bloated sense of self-worth, and think programming is far more valuable as a skill than it actually is. You can't program a computer to do something you can't do, so what we really need are people better at Math, communicating, analytical thought, and problem solving.
I don't really care who wrote it, but I do care who spec'ed it, who tested it and who's got plenty of money that they don't want to lose when it goes out to the public.
The point here is that you can actually have an out-sourced programming goon from elbonia write the code, or you could have the genius aliens from the planet Zod do it for you. You still need to test it actually works. Since you can't trust a vendor to test their stuff responsibly enough, you have to have anti-vendor weapons, like being able to strip them of their money/assets/etc when they make a mess of it. You could have a third party do the testing (like government regulators), but they tend to be pretty inept and a lot less accountable.
As for whether everyone should code or not - everyone should, just as everyone should learn to speak in a second language. You don't need to become fluent and able to blend in any situation, but having a passing knowledge of it makes you a more rounded person, and thus more able to think in different ways as the situation demands. Whether or not you actually do any coding or not in your future life is largely irrelevant.
My wife is a "non-coder" - a physician with no interest whatsoever in computers beyond what they can do for her. Last year she learned to do sophisticated things in R over the course of a few weeks because she wanted to be able to analyze her own research. She had no prior programming experience.
There is a difference between adopting programming as a profession and learning how to use parts of a language or platform in pursuit of particular goals. The second is probably far more common, perhaps even among the /. crowd. The code.org message that programming can be easy and empowering is true in many situations, even if code.org has no idea what those situations are and have a messenger who has never been in one of those situations and can't articulate a single one of them or be credible in any way.
Math and programming, for most non-experts, are things you have to do to get something else done. Home Depot ads aren't about tools, they're about what they get you. We may as well start promoting "hammer time" if we think advertising "code" is going to get any kind of results.
Bugs make their way into production code. No amount of processes will ever change that. The more incompetent programmers you have, the more likely these bugs will slip through the cracks in your processes.
I have worked with and studied under software engineers that worked with the FDA on better methods for validating that medical devices are safe. It is by no means a perfect science. There simply isn't enough time and money to test all medical devices to the degree you seem to think is possible. The FDA relies heavily on just their experience and their ability to identify bad "smells" in the documentation provided by companies. I am amazed that our medical devices are as safe as they are.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The media is doing what the media does best, focusing on photogenic rich celebrities like Jobs and Zuckerberg.
Of course they also made a lot of money for investors as well.
But how much did they really give back to the computer community?
The answer is both made us all a lot less secure.
Frighteningly, software for medical instruments do not have to go through any sort of validation process, nor do those who work on them need to be certified.
There are two local companies where I live. One create medical lasers and the software to control them, the other creates gambling machines.
Guess which company has to spend tens of millions of dollars every year getting their products tested and certified?
Hint: not the medical laser company.