President Obama calls on every American to learn code • Hacker News Board

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#141

Post by oracuk » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:06 PM UTC

entendre wrote: post #103

oracuk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of assumptions built into your proposal that I would want to see some data to support: 1: Computer programming competes with foreign languages in high schools and colleges. 2: The economic value of programming languages is greater than the economic value of foreign languages. Your last sentence also suggests you are comparing apples and oranges, a grade of a foreign language that is dropped against…

1) I don't know what country you're from, but in America here is how it works: In general, competitive colleges require at least two years of foreign language classes in high school. Stanford would like to see three or more years, and Harvard urges applicants to take four years. When a college recommends "two or more" years of a language, they are clearly signaling that language study beyond two years would strengthe…

I still don't see that dropping the foreign language requirement would immediately lead to an increased take up of programming languages. I don't understand why foreign languages are what should be dropped.

If there is limited time for learning and there is no space for programming then any changes should be discussed in light of the full current curriculum. The original post suggested that foreign languages should be dropped in favor of programming languages, there may be other subjects of the curriculum that could be dropped instead, especially if the yardstick of economic value is the measure to be used.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#142

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:08 PM UTC

bpyne wrote: post #119

badman_ting wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you agree that teaching people to code will result in more professional software developers, which seems reasonable to me, we'll have more of them and the cost of any one of them will be reduced. And again, the skill thing is diminished because we all suck at figuring out who the talented developers are. I'm not saying we should hoard the coding knowledge or whatever -- that cat is already out of the bag. But if t…

I doubt President Obama came up with the campaign on his own and I very much doubt "pushing down labor costs for software development" is even on the list of reasons. Labor costs may ultimately come down, but it won't be due to some devious collusion between the IT industry and him. It's more likely that this campaign to encourage programming is aimed at multiple problems from a better understanding of the tools nece…

[deleted]

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#143

Post by mmaunder » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

Talk about a passionless plea. He should be more passionate and the message should be education in general i.e. inclusive of math, literacy, etc.

Anyone notice how tired he looks? His eyes are swollen and red. Rough job.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#144

Post by logfromblammo » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

api wrote: post #6

While I think more people should learn code, I think the president getting up and telling everyone to do anything that isn't applicable to... well... every-freaking-one ... is stupid. Washington is clueless in two ways. (1) It normally doesn't get new things and lags behind. (2) When it does get things, it proceeds to fail at execution or not really get them and do ham-fisted things like this. So that means that Wash…

It's nice that he likes programmers. But the talking heads from DC should be encouraging people to learn job skills in proportion to the numbers needed by the economy of the future.

Clearly, an economy entirely composed of programmers is not viable. There has to be at least one other person to dig out all the basements.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#145

Post by dpcheng2003 » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

badman_ting wrote: post #81

jmduke wrote: post #21

A lot of people are getting attached to the "every American" aspect of things, and I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer." Amateur programming (for lack of a better term) like basic Python for data analysis or HTML/CSS to work on Wordpress sites (Hell, one of my friends who's a Social Media Manager learned Python to create some QoL scripts for her day-to-d…

> I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer." Sure, except we talk all the time about how bad hiring practices are in our industry, how bad we all are at discerning talent. So I don't really see this being a positive thing for existing developers (increasing supply and pushing wages down), though who's to say we deserve the situation we're in presently? Large…

That's a particularly cynical response to something I consider to be incredibly positive, but I think there's a lot of scar tissue in the industry from bad behavior so you may be right to be wary.

Let me tell it from my perspective. I was a finance guy whose only coding experience was a couple of CS classes in college and some excel coding at my job in ibanking. When I decided I wanted to start a company, the first thing I did was spend three months of teaching myself how to do some basic coding. I did the Udacity classes and Codacademy. I read up stuff online and did bash tutorials. I spent 4-6 hours a day doing this because I wanted to be serious.

Today, I'm the CEO of a lightly-funded startup that just got our TechCrunch bump last week. I do all the front-end design and development because of resource restraints (I'm okay at it; not great). But the biggest takeaway from learning to code was not the work itself, but how to talk to developers and manage their time and resources. When I draw up requirements for our dev team, I have a baseline knowledge of what's easily do-able, what's quick vs. what's long, what we can hack and what we need to build to scale. If I started a company in China, I'd expect to learn a little Chinese. Why isn't this the case for people who work in technology?

Now back to the President's announcement. As he stated, software is eating the world and if we want a generation of consumers to have some knowledge of how their world works, then a baseline education in software is critical. Thanks for reading.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#146

Post by UbuntuJon » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:11 PM UTC

I freakin' love Obama.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#147

Post by NAFV_P » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:12 PM UTC

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Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#148

Post by dadagaaa » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:15 PM UTC

Nice. But I would prefer if he first stopped torturing people and putting his own citizens on kill lists.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#149

Post by nickff » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:15 PM UTC

humanrebar wrote: post #84

nickff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or people might under-appreciate the complexity of software. "A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring".

Fair point. But computers are basically magic to a lot of people. Even having a common vocabulary would be an improvement in my opinion.

I agree that a basic understanding of computers would help people; I think that the clarity of syntax, and logical operations would help many people reason more clearly. I also think that schools should teach the history of the transistor with as much emphasis as the history of the industrial revolutions (or maybe even the civil rights movement), because of the enormous impact Shockley's innovation has had on human welfare.

I am not sure that appreciation of complexity is a worthwhile or even an achievable objective.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#150

Post by wes-exp » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 9:15 PM UTC

It's easy to point to the feel-good topic of education and cry foul when anyone is against it.

But here is the reality.

America already overproduces scientists and engineers. The whole notion of talent shortages is generally hot air from special interests (in this case, tech companies) who want a cheaper supply of labor and cannot bear the idea that skilled engineers actually cost a lot.

A lot of effort is put into trying to turn ordinary folk into high-caliber professionals, with things like "everyone should go to college" or in this case "everyone should learn to code". It's not surprising educators are happy about this as it provides a steady customer base (students). Politicians are happy to support it too, after all what could be bad about more education?

The problem is that Joe laborer simply isn't a good fit for STEM fields and no amount of education will change that. He wastes his time and effort trying to become something he's not. In that time he could have been doing something productive and meaningful instead.

I've heard good things about the German model of apprenticeship, which accepts the reality that not everyone is cut out for rocket science. I'd like to see something more like that in America and less bullshit like "coding for everyone". People are different... let's encourage them to do whatever they are actually suited for.