Ready CEO: Coding Snobs Are Not Helping Our Children Prepare For The Future (qz.com)

jader3rd writes: Quartz has an article written by the CEO of Ready, David S. Bennahum, about how public education should be embracing computer science, and how existing programmers don't like these efforts because they feel that doing so will result in kids being exposed to programming in a manner different then how they were introduced to it. Bennahum writes: "Writing software today is eerily similar to what it was like in the late 1950s, when people sat at terminals and wrote COBOL programs. And like the late 1950s, the stereotype of the coder is largely unchanged: mostly white guys with deep math skills, and minimal extroversion. Back in the Sputnik-era, people thought of programmers as a priesthood in lab coats: the sole keepers of knowledge that ran these exotic, and mysterious room-sized machines. Today the priesthood is a little hipper -- lab coats have long given way to a countercultural vibe -- but it's still a priesthood, perhaps more druidic than Jesuitic, but a priesthood nonetheless, largely comprised of white men." "Instead of attempting to lure code-literate teachers away from Silicon Valley, we need to revolutionize the way coding is done. Rather than fit the person to the tool, let's fit the tool to the person. Pop computing can help us get there, offering a gloriously diverse array of tools to match our gloriously diverse species. It's only a matter of time before the process of making software itself is transformed, from one that requires a mastery of syntax -- the precise stringing of sentences needed to command a computer -- to the mastery of logic. Logic is the essence of software creation, and the second step after mastering syntax.'

Comments

Sorry, but you will still need to work for it.

[OrangeTide]

You still need the math background necessary to evaluate algorithms. Intuition is nice and all but when programmers work together as a team, there is need for formal methods because not everyone's intuition leads them to the same place.

As you can see from my writing style, English language is optional. Minimal communication skills necessary would be to grunt and gesture at a whiteboard. (half-kidding)

Re:Sorry, but you will still need to work for it.

[OrangeTide]

So you are doing it intuitively? Congratulations, but I already covered that in my post.

Most of what one needs to know is that big Sigma is a for loop and some simple examples of O(n), O(n^2), O(log n), and maybe O(n log n). Most people I interview can at least intuitively work their way through simple Big O problems, which is usually sufficient to do their day to day job. Maybe it's not sufficient for an architecture to write a whitepaper that will be released to customers, but not everyone is an architect I guess. There is a nice table of informal and formal definitions on wikipedia that might let one compress the most relevant parts of a year or two in CS prerequisite cours into a few minutes.

Why is this stereotype constantly perpetuated

[cyber-vandal]

Neither I or my colleagues are in any way anti-social or socially awkward. Being a developer is a job the same as any other.

"largely comprised of white men."

[TheGratefulNet]

BULLSHIT!

stop lying. this does not help ANYONE when you keep saying the same incorrect bull over and over and over (and over and over).

go to silicon valley. walk the hallways of a cisco or similar. breakdown is roughly 90% indian, 8% various asian and the rest is western-born.

white men? you gotta be kidding me. are you writing this from kansas or something? because where I sit, in the bay area, whites are the smallest minority. walk down cupertino and its almost all chinese. walk most places in the bay area, its all indian. you hear hindi and mandarin and some cantonese along with korean and vietnamese - but english - not much english anymore.

sick of this lock-out culture. if you are not one of the imports, you are not a first choice for a job in this area.

I wonder who keeps paying the liars to lie to everyone? is this swj gone full-retard? or is this just someone from outside tech areas who write from their ivory tower, totally disconnected from reality?

or maybe everyone who writes this drivel KNOWS its a lie but has the agenda to keep pushing MORE imports into comp-sci and asking for more h1b's to enter the US.

or, finally, its just a ploy to get clicks. they know it will get many of us angry and (like me) it caused me to write this and hit 'submit', which gets them clicks.

no matter what the reason is, I'm sick and tired of this crap.

I will punch him in his SPLEEN BONE

[TiggertheMad]

Agreed, this guy needs to be stabbed in the face with a rusty crab.

If you read past the first paragraph or two of TFA, you can see what is really up, he is shilling his company in this puff piece, talking about how whatever shitty software Ready is making will solve all education's woes by teaching kids to code in a completely new and different way.

"Our efforts at Ready, a platform that enables kids to make games, apps, whatever they want, without knowing a computer language, are designed to offer a new approach to broadening access to code literacy."

As a senior coder who has written a lot of code, this guy sounds like a complete tool that I would not trust with two burned out matches and a short piece of string, let alone the education of the next generation of computer scientists.