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This article is deeply wrong. Literacy and universal schooling got masses of people out of poverty because they were able to get more "advanced" jobs. Most of t

This article is deeply wrong. Literacy and universal schooling got masses of people out of poverty because they were able to get more "advanced" jobs. Most of them didn't have composition skills etc, yet at one point we had rows of typists in every office of better part of 20th century (remember this job requires just very basic skills centred around literacy). Writing was art for a long part of human history but it's not anymore. Same is going to be true for programming. Nowadays programmers like to think about themselves as special, but in reality the ability to write simple programs to process input and give output will be just as a normal skill in the future as writing a report is now. Programmers will only be as special as book writers are nowadays - just a little better in putting words-code together so their work has bigger impact.

Swizec 12y ago
It's the difference between a code monkey and an engineer.
icehawk219 12y ago
> Writing was art for a long part of human history but it's not anymore. Same is going to be true for programming. While I want to believe this is true, at least here in the US, I have trouble accepting it. Primarily because so few people you talk to on a day-to-day basis outside of tech are even capable of understanding the most basic concepts. I've even met plenty of people within tech that can't. Introducing people to programming at an earlier age may help sure but we do that with writing and literacy and yet the list of people generally considered "truly great" at writing is still a very small percentage of the population. The big difference being that when I open my old, 1950's typewriter, and decide to type up a little short story that would probably make Stephen King weep for his art, a billion dollar company doesn't crash, a few million credit card numbers don't get leaked, or any of the other countless things that go terribly wrong when programmers screw up. I really do hope we get past the point where stuff like that is a regular occurrence, where computers and networks really are secure, and programming is taught at a young age. I just have trouble seeing any part of it becoming a reality any time soon.
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
Programming and literacy are fundamentally different. Programming is about building machines. It doesn't have to include modelling, although some of the most useful machines do. (How much modelling was needed for the HN code?) Reading and writing are about sharing experiences, learning from them, making moral judgements about them, and persuading, or being persuading by, fellow humans. Only people who don't understand either believe they're equivalent. At best, programming makes sense if you teach it as a practical add-on to math and strict logic. It has its uses there, although I'm sure that by the time one of today's five year olds is enough to entire the job market, knowing school-level Python and jQuery is going to be as useful as knowing BASIC. Programming teaches you nothing about verbal or written comprehension, allusion, metaphor, political and social history, or relationships of all kinds. Learning to read and write is the only way to start exploring that world. (Video-making and photography give a taste of it, but they're still distanced from it.) Programming - which is carpentry and architecture for binary machines - lives somewhere else entirely.
tljr 12y ago
"advanced jobs", "very basic skills". Hmm. Writing can absolutely be art. Did I miss an announcement? Book writers (authors?) are not 'special' nowadays? You're either trolling or you live in a very grey world.
ColinDabritz 12y ago
I think the title was perhaps a misnomer, and it's distracting from the message. The author is arguing that we are miss-framing the literacy involved in programming, and that the real literacy is modeling. He's specifically comparing 'writing' as the act of putting words on paper to 'coding' the act of typing special words on the computer. So we're in agreement that there is an important literacy here to teach the masses. Importantly, the author highlights 'composition' and 'comprehension' as the real literacies behind the mechanical front of 'reading' and 'writing'. He argues the parallel is 'modeling' as the real underlying literacy here, and 'coding' as the mechanical facade. The article focuses on the parts that will be challenging for a long time, tackling the problem, getting ideas out of your head. This is much preferable to 'cargo cult' teaching of language syntax and keywords alone, although those are learned incidentally in the process, they aren't the goal. Paul Lockheart's 'A Mathemeticians Lament' shares many similarities in the field of Math, and is also, I think, applicable to software engineering. [PDF] https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Nowadays programmers like to think about themselves as special, but in reality the ability to write simple programs to process input and give output will be just as a normal skill in the future as writing a report is now. Where input and output respectively can have inordinate amounts of meanings and manifestations. Now, sure, someone writing a quick 4-line script using a hugely abstracted Python library to obtain a value from some document format will probably be a normal skill. Writing just about anything substantial requires large amounts of domain-specific knowledge, specialized skillsets and lots of patience. It's something that actually requires an individual to have legitimate interest in their field - the same way a writer would probably be far more invested in linguistics than a layman, and make it an aspect of their expertise and life skills. In contrast, the average person would use code as a means to an end, likely under the confines of a system that makes the act of writing code be as separated from the workings of the machine as much as possible. Someone parsing CSV doesn't mean they can now write a distributed file system, for instance. The fact of the matter is that we simply do not have the tooling to make programming as easy as 1-2-3. Comparing it to writing isn't even adequate. The analogy would only make sense if the average person needed to know dozens of grammars (protocols) to express themselves in language, among other constraints. They don't. There's a world of difference between practical computing and some sugary ideal of everyone coding like it's their second nature. There's nothing wrong with people picking up programming if they need it. I'm far more content with letting people discover it themselves rather than diluting it by making it a compulsory school subject. Programmers will only be as special as book writers are nowadays - just a little better in putting words-code together so their work has bigger impact. I'd wager this devaluing mindset of computation as an end goal where you simply piece together this magical substance known as "code" (or rockstar/ninja it, whatever) is a major reason why our software is so entangled, brittle and unable to communicate as it is today. An end result being that it makes programming more and more esoteric and inaccessible - something the "learn to code" evangelists should be concerned about.

Swizec 12y ago

It's the difference between a code monkey and an engineer.

icehawk219 12y ago

> Writing was art for a long part of human history but it's not anymore. Same is going to be true for programming. While I want to believe this is true, at least here in the US, I have trouble accepting it. Primarily because so few people you talk to on a day-to-day basis outside of tech are even capable of understanding the most basic concepts. I've even met plenty of people within tech that can't. Introducing people to programming at an earlier age may help sure but we do that with writing and literacy and yet the list of people generally considered "truly great" at writing is still a very small percentage of the population. The big difference being that when I open my old, 1950's typewriter, and decide to type up a little short story that would probably make Stephen King weep for his art, a billion dollar company doesn't crash, a few million credit card numbers don't get leaked, or any of the other countless things that go terribly wrong when programmers screw up. I really do hope we get past the point where stuff like that is a regular occurrence, where computers and networks really are secure, and programming is taught at a young age. I just have trouble seeing any part of it becoming a reality any time soon.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

Programming and literacy are fundamentally different. Programming is about building machines. It doesn't have to include modelling, although some of the most useful machines do. (How much modelling was needed for the HN code?) Reading and writing are about sharing experiences, learning from them, making moral judgements about them, and persuading, or being persuading by, fellow humans. Only people who don't understand either believe they're equivalent. At best, programming makes sense if you teach it as a practical add-on to math and strict logic. It has its uses there, although I'm sure that by the time one of today's five year olds is enough to entire the job market, knowing school-level Python and jQuery is going to be as useful as knowing BASIC. Programming teaches you nothing about verbal or written comprehension, allusion, metaphor, political and social history, or relationships of all kinds. Learning to read and write is the only way to start exploring that world. (Video-making and photography give a taste of it, but they're still distanced from it.) Programming - which is carpentry and architecture for binary machines - lives somewhere else entirely.

tljr 12y ago

"advanced jobs", "very basic skills". Hmm. Writing can absolutely be art. Did I miss an announcement? Book writers (authors?) are not 'special' nowadays? You're either trolling or you live in a very grey world.

ColinDabritz 12y ago

I think the title was perhaps a misnomer, and it's distracting from the message. The author is arguing that we are miss-framing the literacy involved in programming, and that the real literacy is modeling. He's specifically comparing 'writing' as the act of putting words on paper to 'coding' the act of typing special words on the computer. So we're in agreement that there is an important literacy here to teach the masses. Importantly, the author highlights 'composition' and 'comprehension' as the real literacies behind the mechanical front of 'reading' and 'writing'. He argues the parallel is 'modeling' as the real underlying literacy here, and 'coding' as the mechanical facade. The article focuses on the parts that will be challenging for a long time, tackling the problem, getting ideas out of your head. This is much preferable to 'cargo cult' teaching of language syntax and keywords alone, although those are learned incidentally in the process, they aren't the goal. Paul Lockheart's 'A Mathemeticians Lament' shares many similarities in the field of Math, and is also, I think, applicable to software engineering. [PDF] https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

Nowadays programmers like to think about themselves as special, but in reality the ability to write simple programs to process input and give output will be just as a normal skill in the future as writing a report is now. Where input and output respectively can have inordinate amounts of meanings and manifestations. Now, sure, someone writing a quick 4-line script using a hugely abstracted Python library to obtain a value from some document format will probably be a normal skill. Writing just about anything substantial requires large amounts of domain-specific knowledge, specialized skillsets and lots of patience. It's something that actually requires an individual to have legitimate interest in their field - the same way a writer would probably be far more invested in linguistics than a layman, and make it an aspect of their expertise and life skills. In contrast, the average person would use code as a means to an end, likely under the confines of a system that makes the act of writing code be as separated from the workings of the machine as much as possible. Someone parsing CSV doesn't mean they can now write a distributed file system, for instance. The fact of the matter is that we simply do not have the tooling to make programming as easy as 1-2-3. Comparing it to writing isn't even adequate. The analogy would only make sense if the average person needed to know dozens of grammars (protocols) to express themselves in language, among other constraints. They don't. There's a world of difference between practical computing and some sugary ideal of everyone coding like it's their second nature. There's nothing wrong with people picking up programming if they need it. I'm far more content with letting people discover it themselves rather than diluting it by making it a compulsory school subject. Programmers will only be as special as book writers are nowadays - just a little better in putting words-code together so their work has bigger impact. I'd wager this devaluing mindset of computation as an end goal where you simply piece together this magical substance known as "code" (or rockstar/ninja it, whatever) is a major reason why our software is so entangled, brittle and unable to communicate as it is today. An end result being that it makes programming more and more esoteric and inaccessible - something the "learn to code" evangelists should be concerned about.