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"If a programming language doesn't change how you think, it's not worth learning." ~I forget who I always find it funny when people say things like this for our trade. I'd never imagine the likes would be said for Copy Writing or Sales, or Plumbing. Like James from the bookkeeping team decided to start rewiring the light fixtures last week. Spacing out the lights a few feet further apart, and using higher watt LED's…
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Why not? The problem is people can’t. I’m all for people learning how to code but majority of people can’t. That’s the reality. I taught coding in college and bootcamps.
IMO it depends on how long your willing to spend teaching people. Most young students can eventually get basic programs working in logo style systems given enough time. Make coding a core part of public education and I think we could see 80+% of people get reasonable competency by high school graduation. Collages and especially boot camps on the other hand expect people to pick things up much more quickly, and I thin…
I know, because it happened to me.
A major hurdle is trying to get the business people to coherently express what they want. They seem to have a general sense of how something should go, but can’t actually put it down on paper. Or when they do, it looks different than what they imagined (simply because the required logic doesn’t match the cloudy vision they have in their mind), and then scrap it because it doesn’t “feel” right. They fail to think about the corner cases because “that doesn’t happen very often”, ignoring the fact that a program needs to work in all cases, no matter how often they happen. Or they don’t get the concept that processing 10 or 10,000 records makes no difference (i.e. it’s not “more work”) because they don’t really follow the idea that they’re setting the rules for the computer to do the work, not doing it themselves.
Understanding math is so important because it’s often the first formal step in learning how to think this way. I think it’s a pretty good bet that business people who do well in math would probably do well in some level of programming, but everyone else probably just can’t, or at least are unwilling to go through the mental training required to think this way.
Is this the Economists way of stealth advertising Github's CoPilot?
Why not? The problem is people can’t. I’m all for people learning how to code but majority of people can’t. That’s the reality. I taught coding in college and bootcamps.
It's kind of amazing if you think about it that most people are able to learn to read. Spoken language I can understand since it can evolve. Then one day people started writing things down and it turns out somehow we are pretty good at reading things back almost as well as talking to one another. Programming doesn't seem to be like that at all.
1. Most people who learn to read start from a young age. It's rare to teach programming at 6 or incedently practice it everyday.
2. Reading is almost the same as listening, like a 1:1 mapping. So it's evolved with spoken language.
The web was incredibly slow and unreliable. Money aside, I still feel a steady incoming karma flow :)
Well, this makes me feel old. It's no revolution, but a reversion. It was the norm, not that long ago, that anyone could do minor programming. The era of Lotus Notes and the like. You would still hire a programmer for the big stuff, but office workers would build little scripts, or look under the covers when something goes wrong.
I think it's possible to make productive use of programming without claiming to be developing software by which I mean, programs that are expected to be placed into long term or widespread use. That's what we did with programming in BASIC, 40 years ago.
As a scientist, I use programming for things like modeling, data analysis, lab automation, algorithm prototyping, and so forth. You folks all know why. I'm not going to sacrifice that power just because I don't develop full blown software. Scientists programmed before there was a software industry.
If something that I create threatens to end up in a product, it gets handed to the software department. We can hire an army of programmers.
Granted, there is a widely known problem with this approach. A program can evolve to the point where it's really "too big" for a non-developer to manage, but "too small" to justify the cost of spinning up a software development project in a typical organization. I don't have a good solution for that problem.
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I never teach people to code. I ask them what they want to build, and then we work to building that. People don't need to be patient. Beyond assignment, if, for and while, just make sure they use good variable names and function names. Code reviews take care of the rest.
If learning your first programming language doesn't require patience, I don't know what the word means. I've never met anyone who wasn't frustrated for at least the first few months trying to get even basic programs working. The syntax is orders of magnitude less tolerance of mistakes than any other subject.