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Please don't learn to code

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Re: Please don't learn to code

#91
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I said programmer, I meant a professional programmer - as an occupation.

As opposed to a professional "coder"? (I also see "programmer" as a more distinguished title and I prefer it to "coder" (and even "software engineer"), but I don't understand any of these terms to have any generally-accepted definition; personally it is only a matter of taste.)

Ignore the word, what does it even matter? He's simply taking about someone taking it up as a profession vs knowing roughly how it works

Re: Please don't learn to code

#92
post #72

That article is so full of strawmen, it's not even funny. The existence of individuals who wouldn't gain much from learning to code does not imply that no one will gain much from learning to code. I have a hunch that the vast majority of regular office workers has at least some portion of their work which can be trivially automated. Knowing how to code maybe allows these workers to go and code up a script - but even…

"The existence of individuals who wouldn't gain much from learning to code does not imply that no one will gain much from learning to code." In the blog post, Atwood actually writes the following: "Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people." His actual argument is that the "everyone should learn programming" camp is wrong, it is not an opinion that no on…

> His actual argument is that the "everyone should learn programming" camp is wrong, it is not an opinion that no one can gain much from learning programming.

I agree with you that this was the point of the post. I respect Mr. Atwood tremendously, but I think that you and he overshoot the goals of Codecademy and its ilk by a long shot.

As others have stated, the goal is to have a bit more about how the computer works and a bit more about what computer programmers do at work.

Anything beyond that is gravy.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#93
post #68

This largely misses the point. I agree that it's not "essential" and not everyone should do it, but it's still more valuable than I think Attwood gives credit for. I'm perhaps in a unique position to comment, having recently taught my girlfriend to program. So I can talk about how that played out. My girlfriend understands menus, she knows about links, she can install software, she can use word, she can type away lik…

Well spoken, but not all people are like your girlfriend. To most people, learning a bit about programming would primarily be an exercise in frustration.

That's a fair point. It's not so much that everyone will benefit from learning, but that they won't if they don't try. I also think that most people would get something out of it, though admittedly in some cases not much.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#94
I think the most profound lesson to be learned in programming is how complex everything is. Computers aren't "dumb" -- they just don't share our language, culture, biases, etc. You have to specify everything exactly. If anyone has to be dumb, it's going to have to be us. Evolution helped us make sense of the complexity with a bunch of highly complex and very leaky abstractions -- "person", "God", "love", "nature", "property", "fairness", "consent" etc. Only when you try to describe these concepts to a clean slate such as a computer do you realize how complex the world really is. Moreover, these allegedly meaningful things all boil down to meaningless physical states and interactions, so you also get to realize that everything is pointless and what was it again that we are doing here?

Re: Please don't learn to code

#95

I don't like this post and what it implies. If tomorrow you want to learn to cook, how would you feel if a master chef told you "No, don't. You'll never be as good as me. If you're hungry, come to my restaurant instead". I think there's nothing wrong with learning a new skill, whoever you are, whatever you do. Learning new skills is what makes us human.

If tomorrow you want to learn to cook, how would you feel if a master chef told you "No, don't. You'll never be as good as me. If you're hungry, come to my restaurant instead".

I think people who want to learn to program are learning already. The right analogy would be teaching everyone cooking in elementary school as a required subject, together with reading, writing and mathematics.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#96
post #68

This largely misses the point. I agree that it's not "essential" and not everyone should do it, but it's still more valuable than I think Attwood gives credit for. I'm perhaps in a unique position to comment, having recently taught my girlfriend to program. So I can talk about how that played out. My girlfriend understands menus, she knows about links, she can install software, she can use word, she can type away lik…

She understands garbage in - garbage out. She understands dependencies. She understands algorithmic complexity. She understands types and formatting...and much more. (at least generally, which is enough).

This mysterious box no longer seems capricious and opaque. She has a much better understanding of why her computer behaves the way it does and therefore feels more at ease.

This is exactly the benefit from people learning to code: People don't have to actualy code, they just have to have some understading of how a computer work and what problems is easy to automate (as her report updates) to get more productive in their own field. If they can code it on their own, it is only a plus.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#97
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to be facetious, just misunderstanding whatever point original commenter is making. "Most people don't what programming even looks like"? I don't think that is true because most people can search for code samples if needed.

You're missing the point there: if someone's looking for code samples, they're already learning to code.

"If the mayor of NYC wants to learn to program in his spare time, why the hell not?"

I agree totally, not only would it be good for him but it sets a good example for his constituency (because as a basic competence it is good for anyone).

Re: Please don't learn to code

#99

That article is so full of strawmen, it's not even funny. The existence of individuals who wouldn't gain much from learning to code does not imply that no one will gain much from learning to code. I have a hunch that the vast majority of regular office workers has at least some portion of their work which can be trivially automated. Knowing how to code maybe allows these workers to go and code up a script - but even…

That's true, but not necessarily something that office workers would actually want.

Many workers actually sort of enjoy mindless repetitive busy work since it makes you brain feel like your achieving something vs difficult work where you might spend weeks stuck on the same problem.

Case in point:

A fair number of years ago I worked a non tech office job for a few months. Basically a large portion of the job was checking though a spreadsheet looking at figures and checking them against a corresponding row in another part of the sheet. Assuming the figures matched you would copy the figures elsewhere in the sheet, append some characters to them and mark ones that were wrong in red. The data I think came from some legacy database.

There were a few more steps that I don't quite recall but basically they provided a list of instructions on how to do this part of the job and I immediately recognized that this was basically psuedocode, there was nothing "human" required at all. They expected a human error rate of around 1% with this and sheets were often checked twice.

A few days into the job I decided to try writing a Macro to do this job, so that night at home I wrote my macro and emailed it to myself. Next day I loaded it up, ran it and then checked the results by hand. I did this until I was satisfied that the error rate was 0.

Next few days I just started running my macro instead of working by hand, meaning I got about 3 hours work done in under a second and could spend the rest of the day doing other (marginally less monotonous) work.

Now in this office they tracked people's productivity levels as well as their error rate, so naturally I end up with obscene performance stats and no errors.

So the team manager of course asks me to explain myself and I show her the macro and offer to show her how to set it up on other computers and explain how well I tested it etc. The response I got surprised me somewhat.

"You are cheating your stats!" was what I was told. Of course I explained that it wouldn't be "unfair" if everyone had the software. Now at the end of every month they had some (cheap) prize for the person with the highest productivity and lowest error rate and since other tasks were not so easily "scored" the spreadsheet task was a big part of the deal.

No matter how I tried to explain it was like hitting a brick wall, because in her eyes I was "cheating". They had been doing this monotonous work for so long and were so used to it that wasting probably hundreds of man months was preferable to questioning if there might be a better way.

Of course I offered to forfeit any "prize" I might win (despite potentially saving them thousands of pounds), but no we type figures and then somebody wins a prize at the end dammit!

I imagine this sort of brain damaged thinking is common in far more organizations than you might imagine.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#100
Hey, Jeff, here's another way you could look at this:

"I wish I'd thought of [this]... The need for people who can read and write has never been greater. This is a fabulous product at the right time" -- Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media

"A young man asked me for advice for 'those who aren't people who can read and write'. I said he should try to become a person who can read and write" -- Fred Wilson, Partner, Union Square Ventures

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