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Teach kids to farm, not code.

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Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#131

Post by meaty »

tartley wrote: post #117
XorNot wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You never know". But guess what - the apocalypse is not coming. It didn't come in the 20s, 30s, 40s...you get the picture. There's never an apocalypse coming. And even if there were - you probably won't live through it. And if you do...then the better question is why didn't you stop it in the first place? Farming today has to be a large scale, highly studied and high-yielding enterprise. There's lots of room for imp…

Lots of civilisations have collapsed throughout all of history. Millions of people have starved to death as a result. What makes you think we're somehow immune?

Sheer arrogance makes these people think they are immune.

Plenty of people are starving today even probably less than a mile away from anyone eating well.

The system does not serve everyone equally and ultimately we may all suffer one day.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#132

Post by aroberge »

coldtea wrote: post #111
VexXtreme wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that computers and computer science didn't revolutionize the world? They just made people's lives "slightly easier"? What about free instant communication with people who live halfway around the world? What about massive knowledge bases like Wikipedia that never existed on this scale in the past? What about search engines that make every piece of knowledge available to humanity instantly available to…

> I really don't know if you're trolling or you're just being obtuse. So, people "not getting it" are either obtuse or trolls? I'm over thirty -- not some teenager making internet pranks. As such, I don't troll. I say what I believe. Can you fathom that people can have different standards about what it takes to call something "world-changing"? Take a Buddhist monk as an extreme example of a different viewpoint. He wo…

You're over thirty? I'm over fifty. And I have seen huge change in my every day life due to advances in communication. I still remember the first time I used email (summer of 82) and the first time I had a "chat" with a friend of mine who had moved to Germany (in 1986). Perhaps things have not changed significantly for you since you became aware of technology, but they certainly have for me and for countless of other people.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#133

Post by contingencies »

raverbashing wrote: post #6

Yes, farming is hard, very hard Most here don't appreciate how hard it is (especially if you're inexperienced) Do people still grow beans using a cotton in a cup? Do they still teach that at schools? That's basically the 'hello world' of farming Of course, depends on what you are doing, type of plants, inside a greenhouse or in an open field, the scale of it etc. Not to mention raising animals. That's very hard as we…

The selection of cotton is an interesting one, for if the product were edible the children might get the idea they didn't need to work for money.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#134

Post by contingencies »

dschiptsov wrote: post #22

Yeah, coding (especially bad coding) is easy, and requires almost no knowledge, whereas programming is a completely different discipline, which requires a lot (really a lot) of knowledge, especially programming of systems. Programming begins with understanding of how computers work, what is an architecture, an instruction set, size of registers, etc. Look at that MIT Scheme source. They have macroses - 32bit word - w…

Congratulations! You have turned a discussion of the relative merits of learning a critical and historic human discipline in to a rant against virtual machines (illogical, I might add: they are great tools for managing complexity) and the structure of programming organizations.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#135

Post by contingencies »

randomdata wrote: post #96
thejteam wrote: post #29

I think the real takeaway from this is good programmers code, great programmers solve problems. Writing computer code is the means to the end, not the end itself. So we need to learn something else to go along with it. It could be farming. It could be business or finance. It could be sports and fitness. Preferably different people will fall into different categories. The analogy isn't perfect, but think of learning t…

The problem with "great programmers solve problems" is that great programmers are often reluctant to solve problems that don't involve programming. Farming is interesting because you need to make use of all of the tools at your disposal (including programming, electronics, mechanics, etc.) to solve the problems of the farm – of which there are many! Students often have difficulty seeing the forest for the trees. The…

Hey randomdata, I really liked reading your posts on this thread and would be keen to chat by email. Mine's visible in my profile. Cheers.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#137

Post by contingencies »

edw519 wrote: post #78

I don't think we should encourage anyone to do anything. We should discourage them. Let me explain... I take my example from this traditional practice of Rabbis: never accept a convert until they have been turned away twice before. Make them make 3 attempts to show their determination. Why? Because Judaism is hard. If they're not committed, they'll either give up or do just enough to satisify the minimum requirements…

Am I the only one who reads this as selfish, juvenile elitism?

Here's how I see it: Programming is a relatively young discipline. It's not really that hard, we just make it artificially difficult with bad tools, and artificially exclusive with various first world and Anglo-centric measures. We desperately need fresh perspectives. Most of what is built is rebuilt, constantly, with new bugs. As a profession, we tend to lack insight. We need more eyes, particularly fresh eyes, not 'experienced', elitist code-Rabbis.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#138

Post by bad_user »

edw519 wrote: post #78

I don't think we should encourage anyone to do anything. We should discourage them. Let me explain... I take my example from this traditional practice of Rabbis: never accept a convert until they have been turned away twice before. Make them make 3 attempts to show their determination. Why? Because Judaism is hard. If they're not committed, they'll either give up or do just enough to satisify the minimum requirements…

The other side of the coin is that children who aren't exposed to programming will never know how it feels to build software.

And it goes further. People without an education or experience in software development or engineering aren't able to come up with good ideas about what to build because they aren't able to grasp the possibilities of what technology enables.

That feeling you're talking about in regards to building stuff is not something that you're born with, but rather something that grows on you by building stuff.

So no, I don't agree with you. We shouldn't force anybody to do anything of course, but the responsibility of a good educational system is to open up horizons, which means encouraging children to explore as much as possible.

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#139

Post by YuriNiyazov »

edw519 wrote: post #78

I don't think we should encourage anyone to do anything. We should discourage them. Let me explain... I take my example from this traditional practice of Rabbis: never accept a convert until they have been turned away twice before. Make them make 3 attempts to show their determination. Why? Because Judaism is hard. If they're not committed, they'll either give up or do just enough to satisify the minimum requirements…

Ugh. You couldn't be more wrong. We expect everyone to have a basic education about "how the world works". For example, there are increased calls to have the basics of personal finance be something that is taught in schools because the world is getting more complicated with respect to personal finance, and this is uncontroversial - knowing basic personal finance is a good thing. To use a well-known quote, "software is eating the world." Why is knowing how to code somehow different?

Re: Teach kids to farm, not code.

#140

Post by icebraining »

randomdata wrote: post #60
singular wrote: post #7

"This thing #{X} that I am inexperienced at is much harder than this thing #{Y} I spent years doing because I am experienced at #{Y} and have some idea how to do it and thus it feels comfortable. Why, I am going to go so far as to talk down everybody who still does #{Y}, partly because I'm somewhat burnt out on it, and partly because my comparative experience makes me feel like it's easy compared to #{X}." Where:- *…

I've been involved in farming for most of my life and now, as an adult, have my own operation. I also program professionally. With considerable experience in both, I still think farming is the more challenging of the two and believe that farming does require more problem solving over a wide range of disciplines. When the whole learn to code push came to my attention, I also wondered if farming would be a better optio…

farming does require more problem solving over a wide range of disciplines

Does it make sense to compare the two that way? Farming is a an activity that has problems to be solved, programming is a method of solving problems - including farming related ones. Sure, farming has more and more diverse problems to be solved compared to pure programming problems (i.e., CS), but almost every programmer solves problems in other domains, and those are almost infinite.

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