Well I do hope they bring back Prolog or aim for Agda or something symbolic, not byte crunching and MVC. Mainstream coding is a mental regression.
Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
111–120 of 195 posts
Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
#112I am torn. Did we do this before? Was it necessary before? Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up? There are of course always a lot of interested hobbyists when something new comes up but it seems the solution was mostly to hide the complexity and have professional car mechanics instead of making everyone an expert in the new technology.
May programming be different? Because computers and software are so omnipresent? Maybe. But programming is also definitely pretty hard. Is it worth the time? Can you spent enough time learning to program so that it is actually useful in the end without negatively affecting other subjects? I mean in Germany we learn FizzBuzz-level programming in school (and that is what sent me down the software development route) but I don't think that has a lasting impact on many.
When I see what most people are struggling with when using their computers and phones, I would say they don't have to learn to program, they have to learn how those devices, operating systems and protocols work. DHCP or DNS not working? What's up with those drivers? Have you looked into the log file? Is the daemon running? But then again this looks a lot like those kinds of complexities that we used to hide from consumers and have professional mechanics for. We have already come a long way from MS-DOS with everyone using the command line and fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys to a Windows 10 tablet trying to bury all the ugly details under a shinny surface.
Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
#113I am torn. Did we do this before? Was it necessary before? Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up? There are of course always a lot of interested hobbyists when something new comes up but it seems the solution was mostly to hide the complexity and have professional car mechanics instead of making everyone an expert in the new technology. May programming be d…
you don't get it. this is the blue collar job of the next two decades and as for any blue collar job we will need lot of people with the skill to make the job market cheap. get ready for this.
Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
#114I am torn. Did we do this before? Was it necessary before? Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up? There are of course always a lot of interested hobbyists when something new comes up but it seems the solution was mostly to hide the complexity and have professional car mechanics instead of making everyone an expert in the new technology. May programming be d…
I think differently. Required subjects are required not because they have tangible use but because it's worth to learn them as common knowledge. Literature, history, etc can all be argued as unimportant for sustaining your life.
Programming is ubiquitous, and yet there are many people who cannot even imagine what programming is despite having gone through school. To relate to your engine example, ask anyone who has gone through school to try to describe what the insides of a car is like and they can probably explain their own interpretation (whether it is right or wrong). Ask the same people how they think a computer is run and I bet less than 20% can even attempt their own interpretation.
That seems like a common knowledge worth learning.
Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
#115I am torn. Did we do this before? Was it necessary before? Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up? There are of course always a lot of interested hobbyists when something new comes up but it seems the solution was mostly to hide the complexity and have professional car mechanics instead of making everyone an expert in the new technology. May programming be d…
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Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
#116This may not be a good idea. Code is one of those things that by itself sucks until you have a reason or purpose to use it. I started learning coding around age ~9 in 1996 or so. But what got me hooked was websites, because I could use the code to build fan sites or accomplish real, purposeful tasks. I feel like just shoving code at kids isn't going to do much unless they are also incentivized to use it somehow.
I disagree that it will not be useful. Here's a comment that I wrote:
"Required subjects are required not because they have tangible use but because it's worth to learn them as common knowledge. Literature, history, etc can all be argued as unimportant for sustaining your life. Programming is ubiquitous, and yet there are many people who cannot even imagine what programming is despite having gone through school. To relate to your engine example, ask anyone who has gone through school to try to describe what the insides of a car is like and they can probably explain their own interpretation (whether it is right or wrong). Ask the same people how they think a computer is run and I bet less than 20% can even attempt their own interpretation. That seems like a common knowledge worth learning."
It doesn't matter if they are going to make use of it. What matters is that they now have an idea of what programming is and what is possible with programming and how to communicate with those with programming knowledge.
Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
#117It's going to be butchered like English class to point of utter uselessness, no? It's like learning Spanish and then totally and utterly forgetting it. What is then, the leftover value after one finish his secondary education?
I used to think English was useless too until I had to read other people's documentation. The world would be a better place if smart programmers were also competent at writing documentation and comments. I've seen crazy things like punctuation placed in the middle of a sentence. I had to ask, "Is this one sentence or two?" People not using appropriate paragraphs, no headings, rambling sentences etc ... A little bit o…
Not sure what you meant using punctuation in the middle of a sentence is used for clarity e.g. using commas and dashes.
Your not wrong about how documentation is poor - look at a lot of Google's API docs most of it is poor and incomplete.
Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why be optimistic at all? The more people are able to code, the less demand for it, the less salaries of the programmers.
Gotta be pedantic on this one... Demand wouldn't decrease because of more developers being on the market. Supply would increase. Just because any one developer might be individually in less demand doesn't mean that demand for developers has decreased. Yes, this would still depress salaries for developers. Having said that, there is no fixed amount demand for developers. If development resources are a bottleneck for d…
Interesting. The situation when robots not only take the people jobs but because of the robots new jobs get created, comes to mind. Isn't it similar to that?
Yet, I think that robots don't create as many jobs as they take.
Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
#119I am torn. Did we do this before? Was it necessary before? Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up? There are of course always a lot of interested hobbyists when something new comes up but it seems the solution was mostly to hide the complexity and have professional car mechanics instead of making everyone an expert in the new technology. May programming be d…
you don't get it. this is the blue collar job of the next two decades and as for any blue collar job we will need lot of people with the skill to make the job market cheap. get ready for this.
Is there actually evidence that we need more people in IT? The first thing I found was this chart [1] of the GDP split by economic sectors. If things didn't change much over the last five years this doesn't really look like we need everyone in IT. Also the next two decades seems a bit short, it will take about a decade for changes in the education system to show up in the market.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sectors_of_US_Econom...
Re: Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools
#120I am torn. Did we do this before? Was it necessary before? Did we try to teach everyone how internal combustion engines or transistors work when they came up? There are of course always a lot of interested hobbyists when something new comes up but it seems the solution was mostly to hide the complexity and have professional car mechanics instead of making everyone an expert in the new technology. May programming be d…
I think it's more a question of showing the kids that programming exists than making programmers.
In the same way, most people don't need to know how to structure an essay in their jobs, they don't need a foreign language, and they don't need to know algebra.
But it's a window into the richness of life. Show the kids a bunch of stuff, and they will be able to explore further themselves.