Computing is taking a similar path in everyday life as finance. As individuals, I don't feel we need to learn how hedge funds, or complex derivatives work, but nobody denies it is beneficial to learn how to manage money, make basic investments, and plan your retirement. The urge to teach programming isn't as much about teaching everyone complex and theoretical computer science, but to teach basics that will benefit them as we move into the information age where technology permeates nearly every business.
Please Learn to Code
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Re: Please Learn to Code
#32I remember when VBA came out in MS Office. Now your average tech savvy office drone could morph their excel spreadsheets into a full blown application capable of processing business data without having to jump through any of the traditional hoops the evil IT department normally demands. And we ended up with a ton of buggy, dangerous "mission critical" piles of garbage because they were "designed" and built by non-pro…
I still think those «buggy, dangerous "mission critical" piles of garbage» are valuable.
If there was no VBA, the jobs these scripts were created for would still be done manually, with a mouse, by some secretary somewhere. "Getting a professional to do it" would never enter into the picture when you're talking about a BigCorp with a conservative, limited-budget IT department.
Re: Please Learn to Code
#33I remember when VBA came out in MS Office. Now your average tech savvy office drone could morph their excel spreadsheets into a full blown application capable of processing business data without having to jump through any of the traditional hoops the evil IT department normally demands. And we ended up with a ton of buggy, dangerous "mission critical" piles of garbage because they were "designed" and built by non-pro…
Shit code will come from non-coders at the same rate as from coders. The reason that your buggy and dangerous missions critical piles of application (that eventually DID something useful for whoever used that) is garbage is because the people who coded didn't know a single thing about coding, and simply dived into it trying to achieve something they needed, and it worked [up to a point].
That's the whole point of this, learning to code gives you the option to make something you otherwise would consider magic.
You say you do not expect your lawyer to learn to code, but do you expect him to have basic mathematical tools to be able to have a conversation with him about stocks and options and percentages, right? Well, in the not so distant future these simple mathematical tools that we learn early on in life will be incorporated with basic programming tools.
No, lawyers still won't be able to code a Facebook from scratch, but they will be able to code basic HTML template for legal documents, and generate simple reports when they need to. Obviously they'll have secretaries and code monkeys that will do their bidding for money, as always, but they will still know the basic principles of software development, unlike today that most non-technical people consider software as black magic.
Re: Please Learn to Code
#34I expected a similar post to hit HN, since I too was shocked by Jeff's comments. However I do not think people should learn to code for the same reason. Sure writing a website is cool, but then again, learning plumbing is cool, which is the basis of Jeff's argumentation. Plumbing can empower you by giving you control over your own house and appliances, etc, etc. I think the real reason people should learn to code, is…
Didn't Jeff make the point that people should be taught "computer skill" for the reasons you just listed? You can learn about the ins and outs of technology without learning to code.
Re: Please Learn to Code
#35Please do not compare coding to cooking.
Please justify why you think it's a bad comparison? I think it's apt. Cooking shares many qualities with coding, you're under time deadlines to produce something for a end consumer (for the most part). There's lots of competing methods and you have to select which ones work best for the product you want to produce. Most importantly you can cook something amazing that everyone loves, or a charred lump that no one will…
Cooking is way more simple compared to programming. The recipes are easily understood - a complete opposite to software specs.
Cooking does not evolve that fast compared to programming. Everybody loves their grandma's pie.
And most important cooking is manufacturing and programming is designing. Regular cooking is trying to reproduce something that was done as close as possible, while programming involves dealing with lots of specifics.
Re: Please Learn to Code
#36I think everybody should learn to code at school when they're kids. That way, they can decide if they want to become real programmers/software-engineers or something else.
Just as every kid learns mathematics does not mean he/she has to become a full-fledged PhD researching manifolds in Topology. But they still need to know how to calculate percentages, basic statistics etc to get through life more easily.
In the same way, giving instructions to a computer the "hard" way instead of via clicking on buttons and letting magic happen is often a good exercise to appreciate the power and freedom it gives you. I remember doing this when I was 9 or 10 and doing locate, print, cls repeatedly in a BASIC loop let me create an animation I could control quite precisely (well no, CPU cycles came into play!)
But that's the precise reason, 18 years on, I delve into programming GPUs, wrote games with advanced Direct3D shaders for them and am currently wrting OpenCL code to solve complex equations on them.
It's all because of the locate, print, cls loop!
Re: Please Learn to Code
#37Learning some VBA counts as learning to code in my opinion.
I've temped before and been told to do nothing more than prettify and unify formatting in an Excel spreadsheet (for later insertion into a db).
(555)555-1212, 555.555.1212, (555) 555-1212, 555-555-1212, and so on to some standard format is a 10 minute job regardless of size.
Not everyone needs to be able to really program, but a healthy respect and knowledge of what a couple of one liners can do saves lots of money. That's money that could be spent on truly productive tasks that would actually drive the economy and not burden it.
Re: Please Learn to Code
#38I can hear it now, "but hey, during code year I learned how to hello world, why is your estimate so hi, it's not that hard".
We should REALLY do this with healthcare. Who needs doctors. All hail self diagnosis year 2013!
Re: Please Learn to Code
#39I can hear it now, "but hey, during code year I learned how to hello world, why is your estimate so hi, it's not that hard". We should REALLY do this with healthcare. Who needs doctors. All hail self diagnosis year 2013!
> We should REALLY do this with healthcare. Who needs doctors. All hail self diagnosis year 2013!
Did you ever take a biology class?
Re: Please Learn to Code
#40I remember when VBA came out in MS Office. Now your average tech savvy office drone could morph their excel spreadsheets into a full blown application capable of processing business data without having to jump through any of the traditional hoops the evil IT department normally demands. And we ended up with a ton of buggy, dangerous "mission critical" piles of garbage because they were "designed" and built by non-pro…
I still think those «buggy, dangerous "mission critical" piles of garbage» are valuable. If there was no VBA, the jobs these scripts were created for would still be done manually, with a mouse, by some secretary somewhere. "Getting a professional to do it" would never enter into the picture when you're talking about a BigCorp with a conservative, limited-budget IT department.
During my internship at a manufacturing company, I knew enough about VBA to record a macro in Excel (just record, no actual coding involved) to automate ~10 minutes of work I had to complete monthly and included step-by-step instructions for how to run the macro and what the macro did.
When I came back a year later after graduating, I learned the process was again being done manually because my replacement did not have even a basic understanding of how to interpret what a macro does from the script.
A few months ago, I automated ~6 hours of monthly Excel work through ~4 hours of trial and error of recording macros and manually editing them. I have zero training in coding other than osmosis from my brother who is an iOS programmer, but I wasn't afraid to screw up enough to figure it out.
Based on my first experience, unless my eventual replacement has at least a curiosity about how macros work I wouldn't trust them to effectively run my script over the long term--if anything breaks, they won't be able to fix it.
The point is, a lack of basic, basic understanding of coding could end up costing the company the 75+ hours/year I was able to save with a "buggy, dangerous...pile of garbage" when I either move to a new role or leave. This was something which would never have been a high enough priority for our coders to write for us. Multiply that through 25 people in our finance department, and you're talking about needing an additional full-time employee.
Can anyone recommend a good place to learn enough VBA to move past the buggy and dangerous stage?