Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro • Hacker News Board

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#41

Post by balabaster » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #31

camjw1123 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bit harsh, the current industrial strategy is pretty decent ( https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/the-uks-industr... ), whether they will deliver on this remains to be seen but it's not like they aren't thinking about industrial policy.

The scale of ambition is completely different. The Computer Literacy Project put a computer in every school and led to 141 TV programmes over a decade. At the highest levels of government, it was seen as an urgent priority. We wanted to be a world leader in software and we heavily invested to make that at least plausible on a per-capita basis. Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk…

The UK may have wanted to be a world leader in software and may have heavily invested in education, but then they failed to keep their programmers by creating jobs that paid those developers a competitive enough salary to stay in the UK.

A huge portion of us left the country to take our software skills to countries we would be paid competitive salaries and have a high quality of life. Those countries are exploiting the UK's investment by offering a high quality of life and a streamlined path through their immigration policies, pillaging UK developers and negating the billions of dollars the UK spent to get ahead.

Having kept a close eye on the development market in the UK for the past 20 years, it's becoming apparent that there will never be an opportunity to bring our skills back home.

It's no good investing in education if you don't provide the opportunity for that education to bring long term benefit to the UK. You need to keep the people once you've trained them and they're just not going to stick around while other countries salaries and immigration policies make it easy to take those skills where they're going to be guaranteed easy access to a high quality of life. Those developers are never going to come back if they face the prospect of losing 80% of their salary and their partner not being able to work for for a period during the immigration process.

This is a huge gap that the UK seriously needs to look at. There's no point in having an industrial policy that trains people if you're just going to lose a huge portion of them at the end of that training, never to see them again.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#42

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

balabaster wrote: post #41

jdietrich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale of ambition is completely different. The Computer Literacy Project put a computer in every school and led to 141 TV programmes over a decade. At the highest levels of government, it was seen as an urgent priority. We wanted to be a world leader in software and we heavily invested to make that at least plausible on a per-capita basis. Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk…

The UK may have wanted to be a world leader in software and may have heavily invested in education, but then they failed to keep their programmers by creating jobs that paid those developers a competitive enough salary to stay in the UK. A huge portion of us left the country to take our software skills to countries we would be paid competitive salaries and have a high quality of life. Those countries are exploiting t…

Can confirm - though I’m younger than the BBC Micro generation. After I got my BSc in CS I got a job offer from a west-coast FAANG company. My friends I went to uni with who are still in the UK doing jobs that require their degree make about 1/4 to 1/2 what I do, and I don’t even think I’m particularly good at what I do either. I note that at the pay-scales we’re talking about the “hidden” differences in CoL (like healthcare costs, etc) don’t really matter anymore.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#43

Post by rahimnathwani » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

timthorn wrote: post #22

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a paper letter to Teletext and get an answer, love it. The internet and the web has som serious warts, but it is also amazing.

And if you were really into Teletext (and had enough cash) you could get an adaptor to download software OTA: http://www.heyrick.co.uk/software/ttx/ttxouse.html

This reminds me that I saw a TV programme once where they played the tape of a program for the BBC Micro over the air, and suggested that a viewer hold up their tape recorder to the TV speaker, to record it, for later loading onto the computer.

I never tried it. I'm not sure whether acoustic coupling would have worked well enough to load successfully.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#44

Post by jdietrich » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:07 PM UTC

balabaster wrote: post #41

jdietrich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale of ambition is completely different. The Computer Literacy Project put a computer in every school and led to 141 TV programmes over a decade. At the highest levels of government, it was seen as an urgent priority. We wanted to be a world leader in software and we heavily invested to make that at least plausible on a per-capita basis. Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk…

The UK may have wanted to be a world leader in software and may have heavily invested in education, but then they failed to keep their programmers by creating jobs that paid those developers a competitive enough salary to stay in the UK. A huge portion of us left the country to take our software skills to countries we would be paid competitive salaries and have a high quality of life. Those countries are exploiting t…

We failed to capitalise on the advantages we had created. It has to be remembered that the Computer Literacy Project ended in 1989. The following decade was not kind to the British computer industry, in large part due to a lack of investment and leadership. Thatcher (for all her faults) was seriously committed to computing, but Major just didn't get it.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#45

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

growlist wrote: post #36

pjc50 wrote: post #4

The computer literacy project was basically the last UK government attempt at doing industrial policy. It was a huge success, so they gave up on it and have abandoned industrial policy to market forces and financialisation. We have gone from that to "eff business". https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2019-02-14b.1068....

> It was a huge success, so they gave up on it This made me chuckle. I hear it again and again with regard to British innovation and entrepreneurship to the degree that it's almost a cliche, but would be interested to know if there's anything solid behind the idea (and that's not a snarky 'sources?' comment BTW, just genuinely interested to know if this supposed phenomenon has been substantiated). Is it just the case…

Several books could be written on the subject. My personal recommendation is Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/aug/14/featuresreview...

A lot of this needs to be seen in the context of post-imperial decline, and (in the 70s at least) serious financial difficulties. We could probably have made some of TSR2, Black Arrow, Magnox, APT, Concorde, Trident/Polaris, etc big successes with adequate funding, but we could never have done all of them. It looks like Concorde was one of the ones that was chosen to be funded to completion, partly due to the personal intervention of Tony Benn.

(Possible counterexample: the three V-bombers)

A lot of things were funded to the first failure but not to the first success. A common problem - NASA would never have been able to do what SpaceX did because the funding would have been pulled on the first failed landing, despite this being an anticipated part of the development plan.

In the private sector, any history of this would have to cover the class system and industrial action. Also CP Snow's "Two Cultures".

I would probably also list the UK's small mindedness towards immigration; the US was a magnet for fleeing scientists and intellectual refugees after the war. Much of SV's success is due to immigration or internal migration: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by...

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#46

Post by PaulAJ » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #31

camjw1123 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bit harsh, the current industrial strategy is pretty decent ( https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/the-uks-industr... ), whether they will deliver on this remains to be seen but it's not like they aren't thinking about industrial policy.

The scale of ambition is completely different. The Computer Literacy Project put a computer in every school and led to 141 TV programmes over a decade. At the highest levels of government, it was seen as an urgent priority. We wanted to be a world leader in software and we heavily invested to make that at least plausible on a per-capita basis. Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk…

Your last words are ironic. Anyone writing on the subject at the time would have ended with "we're being left in the dust by Japan".

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#47

Post by protomyth » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

russfink wrote: post #12

In the U.S. as a kid, they aired some of these programs. On one episode, they showed a computer playing tic-tac-toe (naughts and crosses) and claimed that it learned as it went. To this day, I don't know how it did that - maybe building a simple game tree? Still impressive. I always wanted one, but could afford only the TS-1000 (ZX81 but black). I was like 12.

In the history of computers, I don't think Sir Clive Sinclair gets near enough credit for the number of programmers that resulted from his machines that had no chance to afford something more.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#48

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

Udo wrote: post #16

When a friend attempted to teach basic programming to his kids, I realized we're in trouble (for some definition of trouble, see below). First of all, the article is right in opining that the pathways to computer literacy in general, and programming in particular, are not really all that accessible anymore. The problem becomes even worse due to the sheer number of "teaching" tools available. My friend had trouble eve…

There's a case for programming being a subset of literacy - like art, music, science, literature, and knowing how to make and post popular videos on YouTube.

You don't have to be good at software for the learning to be worthwhile. There's a major potential lightbulb moment for anyone who gets to the point where they realise just how complex the technology that keeps us all alive is, and just how unwise it is to take it for granted.

But there's also no point in trying to relive the past. 70s/80s computer culture was partly driven by the fact that computers seemed to be expensive, room-filling, and mysterious. Now computers are ubiquitous, tiny, and absolutely mundane. So the mystery and inaccessibility have disappeared, and kids need a more direct motivation.

Saying "You'll be able to get a good job" is not a valid approach, because for all anyone knows in 10-15 years AI will have automated away all those well-paying jobs.

But someone who has some curiosity about how things work, and some experience of making them work, will always be able to ride the future better than someone who has never tried and never understood why they might need to care.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#49

Post by Someone » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #43

timthorn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you were really into Teletext (and had enough cash) you could get an adaptor to download software OTA: http://www.heyrick.co.uk/software/ttx/ttxouse.html

This reminds me that I saw a TV programme once where they played the tape of a program for the BBC Micro over the air, and suggested that a viewer hold up their tape recorder to the TV speaker, to record it, for later loading onto the computer. I never tried it. I'm not sure whether acoustic coupling would have worked well enough to load successfully.

It could be made to work, even without error correction. See for example https://www.hobbyscoop.nl/the-history-of-basicode/, which describes the Dutch way to broadcast (portable!) Basic programs over radio.

I think they broadcast every program multiple times, though.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#50

Post by el_cujo » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

mxcrossb wrote: post #32

The article seems very concerned about what is the right level of abstraction to teach. I understand the appeal of starting with Jacob’s loom, especially when you’re going to follow up with something low level like basic. But maybe code academy disagrees. Maybe young people these days don’t need convincing that computers just follow language commands, and with a high level language that’s maybe a safe lie to teach. W…

I guess I've never seen the BBC series, but from the description I don't think it really has the same target audience or goals as Codeacademy. Codeacademy is (mostly) targeted to giving people practical skills to get a job with, while the BBC series sounds like it's more about general education on computers for people who might casually encounter them in real life, not those who are interested in computers as a career. Sort of like in college when everyone might have to take a general biology class, I imagine this would not be structured the same as a biology class targeted to medical school students or those majoring in biology.