I wish algorithms were emphasized rather than code. Programming languages and frameworks are too much in flux right now. Education curriculum dont evolve very quickly so they would be baking in programming as it exists currently and recreate scenarios like Pascal being taught long after it was relevant in the mainstream.
President Obama calls on every American to learn code
201–210 of 441 posts
Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code
#202>Starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, Drew Houston, Gabe Newell, Ruchi Sanghvi, Elena Silenok, Vanessa Hurst, and Hadi Partovi. Directed by Lesley Chilcott, executive producers Hadi and Ali Partovi. >Code.org owes special thanks to all the cast and the film crew, and also Microsoft, Google/YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter for helping us spread the word What the f…
> Is America really that desperate to destroy the only real market it has left? You guys might applaud this but the only thing which this will lead to is unqualified people thinking they know how to program. That ship has already sailed, and in the world of corporate/enterprise software development I'd argue it was never really docked, so to speak. Hell, as recently as my last job, less than a year ago, I worked with "business analysts" who, because they put together the front-end forms of an Access database and wrote some basic SQL thought they were "coders".
They shouldn't be a source of worry to skilled programmers. These "amateurs" will never be able to take the job of a person who is truly skilled and seeking a position that actually requires that skill, at least not for any length of time.
There is some legitimate cause for concern about wages. Big companies would love for nothing more than to see a complete commoditization in the wage of software developers. Hell, I'd argue a significant number already believe that software developers are interchangeable. They'd be right a good proportion of the time, but not nearly as often as they might think (or like).
Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code
#203A 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…
Asking the American people to code is not going to solve the nation's problems. What it does is add one more tool a citizen can use to make him or herself more useful to society.
What the president should encourage people is to become a MAKER - a general term for DIY manufacturing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture
People will not learn to code unless they have a reason. Maker is more people trying to solve their own problems. It may happen that others may have the same problem and there may be some opportunity.
Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code
#204A 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 agreed totally with the every american should change a tire thing. And learning to code is awesome, we need more developers, or even if people won't be developers at leafs they have some idea what is involved.
Next step, teach everyone in america, how to keep windows free of viruses... nah... maybe teaching everybody to code is easier. :)
Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still find value within in. Sorry! Specialization is important for society collectively, diversity is important for the individual. Balance is key. I don't want to die gallantly though, just satisfied with whatever I've accomplished and left behind.
I can certainly agree with that. "Specialization is for insects" is needlessly insulting, though...
But true. How many jobs will you have during your lifetime? Will you only use one skill throughout all of them, or even just one?
Specialization isn't just for insects. Its for robotics and software. Anything that can't learn and evolve.
Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code
#206"President Obama calls on every American to learn code"
We tried that already. It was called Visual Basic. It's arguable how much value was created.
Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code
#207Earlier 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…
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Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code
#208Kevin Drum (spoilers: knows how to code) had the best take on this: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/12/no-everyone-do... But wait. The link leads me to a fairly routine presidential video in honor of Computer Science Education Week, in which President Obama encourages kids to take computer science classes. "It's important for our country's future," he says. But I imagine he's cut dozen of videos for every…
> But coding? Unless it's part of your job, the odds are vanishingly small that it will ever be of much use to you. It's silly to reduce this to "Programming is useless outside of STEM". I once saved an admin assistant _days_ of work because I happened to stop by her desk to chat and noticed the task she was doing (combining some spreadsheets) would be trivial to automate. She had estimated at the rate she was going,…
Good point. Knowing it could be done would have been good enough for her, because then she would have known to ask someone to help her. If you have at least an idea of what's possible, you can then have a good idea when it makes sense to ask the expert to give you a little help.
She certainly would never _need_ to know how to do it herself, although there's nothing wrong with that. If she were asking the expert for something every day, then it might make sense to teach her more, but if the requests are infrequent and not time-consuming, then the productivity wins can be had without teaching someone something she doesn't need to know.
Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should also be teaching how to change a tire, how to cook basic nutritious meals, personal finance, etc.. “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a compu…
I hate that quote. It starts fine, but then reaches a stupid conclusion. I wonder how much worse our life would have been without centuries of specialization: in science, in education, in business...
> I hate that quote. It starts fine, but then reaches a stupid conclusion.
The thing at the end is the premise that the rest comes from, not the conclusion it reaches.
Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code
#210Does President Obama know how to code?