Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Revisiting Why Johnny Can't Code: Have We "Made the Print Too Small"?

Posted by timothy on from the sign-here-you're-on-your-own dept.

theodp writes: In What is Computer Science?, the kickoff video for Facebook's new TechPrep diversity initiative, FB product manager Adriel Frederick explains how he was hooked-on-coding after seeing the magic of a BASIC PRINT statement. His simple BASIC example is a nice contrast to the more complicated JavaScript and Ruby examples that were chosen to illustrate Mark Zuckerberg's what-is-coding video for schoolkids. In How to Teach Your Baby to Read, the authors explain, "It is safe to say that in particular very young children can read, provided that, in the beginning, you make the print very big." So, is introducing coding to schoolkids with modern programming languages instead of something like BASIC (2006) or even (gasp!) spreadsheets (2002) the coding equivalent of "making the print too small" for a child to see and understand?

8 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Dice, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Please stop shilling for Facebook. You do it endlessly. No one likes Facebook or its douchebag in chief.

  2. Re:BASIC by 91degrees · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Dijkstra's a dick"

    -- 91degrees

    Influential and important to CompSci, certainly but that doesn't mean he wasn't a bit up himself at times. Not everything he says is gospel.

  3. Maybe Johnny just doesn't give a fuck by NotDrWho · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybe Johnny wants to choose his own fucking interests, instead of having them imposed by a corporate oligarchy only interested in cheap labor.

    --
    SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
  4. Basic is good, but not enough by gb7djk · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Forty five years ago, I started with some BASIC. But the thing that really got me hooked was that I had a simple problem, that mattered to me, that needed solving.

    The need to solve a problem, being presented with a tool simple enough to understand and some help to get started seems to me to be the true trigger that can start someone off down the programming track.

  5. Way too small by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When I was a kid getting into programming, I constantly ran into a wall. The basics, like hello world, and command line input->output programs that can do an enormous variety of calculations, background work, execute even big and fun commands were always easy, instructions prevalent, how to's everywhere and easy to understand.

     
     
    Then you want to actually move from moderately complicated programs that are useless to real ones that do something, and I hit a wall. How to make a GUI work, how to make graphics appear, how to do anything useful at all in any kind of app, desktop program, etc, and the tutorials jumped from 5 easy to understand lines to 50 page books on how to get a single line to appear, much less do anything else.

     
     
    Excessively complicated syntax, and extremely difficult, complicated programming required for even simple programs in a useable context make it opaque, that is the small print. The resources are plentiful for the most basic coding, plentiful on algorithms and how they work, but the second you get to a moderately complex topic of actually making applications you can double click and use, I might as well be trying to learn how to do complex multivariable calculus in a non-euclidean geometry based on a few comments on a thread on a help page that was posted and died 8 years ago.

  6. Who Cares? by sycodon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Johnny can't cook a souffle, Johnny can't make a dove joint, Johnny, can't fix a car, Johnny can't set a broken arm, Johnny can't balance and income statement, etc.

    But there is at least SOME people that can do it. These are all disciplines/careers that people elect to pursue. Not everyone needs to know how to code. That's stupid. Does everyone need to know how to design, cut, and sew together a pair of pants?

    Does knowing how to code make it any better when Windows or Windows apps go toe up? Really? Are you going to debug Windows or Mathematica because you took a coding class?

    --
    When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    1. Re:Who Cares? by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Any job that involves sitting at a computer leads to days when knowing how to automate a simple task is beneficial. My big brother's doing data entry, and he's been battering together VBA scripts (VBA because Excel is the nearest thing to a programming environment on his client's computers) to generate search strings that account for common mistypings of address formats etc, making him one of the quickest on his team. I did a 3-day data filtering job in 1 day because I scripted in in Windows .BAT rather than manually searching through the data. I'm now training to be a school teacher, and I'm programming my own web-pages to make use of the interactive whiteboard in a way that's natural to me and keeps me in control of everything happening in the class. Everyone can use some programming now and again.

      --
      Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
  7. Re:BASIC by Pseudonymous+Powers · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Dijkstra's a dick"

    Yup. But the particular polarity of his dickishness helps to balance out its opposite--that is, all the millions of shitty programmers who hate rigor just because it's rigorous, and proselytize against it at every opportunity. He's a lot like Richard Stallman in this way--an impractical dick, to be sure, but a useful dick nontheless.

    Plus, Dijkstra had a sense of humor, which makes him more fun to quote.