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President Obama calls on every American to learn code

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Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#321

Post by mlangdon »

badman_ting wrote: post #90
theseoafs wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? In what way does high school kids learning to write simple Python scripts affect your career as a software d…

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…

This assumes a constant supply of programming work, which is simply laughable. We probably only ever need, e.g., so many lawyers as a proportion of the population, but the demand for programmers relative to supply is accelerating. Failing to train more people now risks either simply not being able to do the work, or an opening of the immigration floodgates in which case present demand could theoretically be met and wages could be depressed. But doing this slowly through educational initiatives would be a minimal risk to salary status quo.

Keep in mind, there is virtually no one available to teach everyone to code. Many US states regard computer science as a high school elective and thereby disincentivize schools from offering it.

Then take someone like me who really likes the idea of teaching programming, but would need about three more years of college to qualify and then would see my wages cut in half, with minimal job security (initially) or advancement in salary (forever) and all the attendant disrespect that our society bestows on teachers.

Being able to teach all our kids to code would be a good problem to have.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#322

Post by eru »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #263
eru wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by proper grammar? Stuff like using "you and me" correctly and not falling into the "you and I" prestige English trap? People acquire proper grammar naturally with their native language.

Do you really think the parent is talking about "nit-picky" stuff such as that ... Are you aware of no grammar problem anywhere in the US??? Really? You would have to be pretty sheltered for that to be the case.

I'm glad to be sheltered from the US, by having only visited once.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#324

Post by Apocryphon »

pearjuice wrote: post #60

>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…

Better than a STEM shortage.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#325

Post by tmzt »

aegiso wrote: post #306
rhizome wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony about your very valid benefits of having basic programming knowledge is that music programs, which have been proven to provide benefits in math and language and just general smartyhood, are the first to get their budgets cut in any given budget battle. That said, how many working people have ever had to face the problem of getting a list of filenames into an email? http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/music…

> That said, how many working people have ever had to face the problem of getting a list of filenames into an email? Few, because when tasked with a problem that this could solve, most people would immediately throw up their hands and give up. This is the biggest obstacle of all. "Which pictures are you missing?" "I don't know, I'm not going to flip through them all!"

Or take a series of screenshots (scrolling through the files as they go) which they then will paste into Word.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#326

Post by eropple »

Steko wrote: post #310
MichaelGG wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, lots of people end up using information systems incidentally to what their main task is. I wrote a script in 20 minutes to automate some email->shipping labels work and saved someone about 5 hours of work a day. As more people start using datasets in some capacity for their "real jobs", being able to automate things becomes increasingly important. The amount of insane labor going on using Office boggles my mind.…

"I wrote a script in 20 minutes to automate some email->shipping labels work and saved someone about 5 hours of work a day" I see a number of anecdotes like this and they all seem to miss that their actual anecdote is actually something like: I saved a non-coder X hours by drawing on my thousands of hours of experience . No one disputes that knowing how to code would be useful to many people. What's being disputed is…

I don't think anyone's saying that non-coders need to become thousands-of-hours coders. But being aware that it's possible to automate these tasks makes (or so the thinking goes) people more likely to realize that specific tasks can be automated.

I have a project rather similar to your "going around and helping automate" in my backlog at work, actually, but it'd be a lot more efficient if the people doing the work were in a place to have an idea of what my time would be best used doing rather than me having to do the digging.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#327

Post by rhizome »

eropple wrote: post #318
rhizome wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony about your very valid benefits of having basic programming knowledge is that music programs, which have been proven to provide benefits in math and language and just general smartyhood, are the first to get their budgets cut in any given budget battle. That said, how many working people have ever had to face the problem of getting a list of filenames into an email? http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/music…

> That said, how many working people have ever had to face the problem of getting a list of filenames into an email? A lot of my coworkers. They take a screenshot, thus offloading the hard part onto everyone who needs to get data out of their email. It's about as awesome as it sounds.

What industry do you and your co-workers work in?

As far as the hard part goes, I'd think an OCR script could handle this even if they're using Comic Sans for their file manager font.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#328

Post by hyp0 »

grellas wrote: post #217

Speaking as a non-coder, but as one who did minimal things with programming-like higher-level stuff ranging from the old DOS batch files to VBA and some dabbling with SQL, I am curious whether real engineers believe the idea of broad literacy in coding truly would be valuable and, if so, how exactly. I am not speaking as a skeptic, just as one who does not readily see the point and wants to know. Of course, we are in…

Reading, writing, 'rithmetic are about the only really useful things taught in schools. The rest is important for "education", broadening the mind, and practicing learning.

Learning a second language is not only important for "broadening the mind", but it also helps you to see your native tongue objectively - with more than one instance, you gain an concrete inkling of what is general, what is specific.

  We shall not cease from exploration
  And the end of all our exploring
  Will be to arrive where we started
  And know the place for the first time.
Arguably, a programming language can do this directly, or at least lay some foundations. Like natural language (and arithmetic expressions), it has a grammar.

I think there is a deeper purpose of high school education (which seems to be completely unrealized): becoming acquainted with the human heritage of how to know things. That is, maths as a way of proving truth, not just of practical use. Programming has a role, in show how we can make things work - like mechanics and forms of government. Of course, this is philosophy, and not for everyone. But I think everyone is entitled to a taste, so they can make up their own mind.

All that said, actual programming is probably pretty useless. A law student I knew took CS 101 and sincerely believed that the discipline was about knowing all the control codes. Sadly, that is a huge part of what we do - programming requires a whole of nonsense, of arbitrary escaping rules, inconsistent tool and ridiculously arcane procedures for getting anything done - and if you get a little bit wrong, the whole thing fails! - and it's impossible to tell what went wrong unless you already understand it. [source: tutored first year CS students]

The programming tool that ordinary people cope with best, that has minimal nonsense, and also has enormous practical benefit is not thought of as programming at all - the spreadsheet.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#329

Post by MichaelGG »

Steko wrote: post #310
MichaelGG wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, lots of people end up using information systems incidentally to what their main task is. I wrote a script in 20 minutes to automate some email->shipping labels work and saved someone about 5 hours of work a day. As more people start using datasets in some capacity for their "real jobs", being able to automate things becomes increasingly important. The amount of insane labor going on using Office boggles my mind.…

"I wrote a script in 20 minutes to automate some email->shipping labels work and saved someone about 5 hours of work a day" I see a number of anecdotes like this and they all seem to miss that their actual anecdote is actually something like: I saved a non-coder X hours by drawing on my thousands of hours of experience . No one disputes that knowing how to code would be useful to many people. What's being disputed is…

This case was actually embarrassingly simple -- a keyboard macro script. Arrow down, tab, ctrl-a, ctrl-c, alt-tab, ctrl-v, alt-tab, tab, repeat. I had never written such a script before, I just saw her hand motions were repetitive and figured it could be automated. Time spent was 1 minute looking at the keys entered, 15 minutes searching how to send keystrokes, and a few minutes deploying.

If admin people had some familiarity with coding and such, they'd be more quick to realise "wait, I'm acting like a mindless robot - this has to be scriptable somehow". Yet I've seen this kind of manual repetition (copying parts of an Excel sheet, concatenating files, etc.) plenty of times. It's often surprising to the admin people that some things are automatable, and some things are so obvious to programmers, that sometimes neither side realises there's a problem that can be fixed.

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