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

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#411

Post by aestra » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 1:54 PM UTC

pmichaud wrote: post #151

Steko wrote: post #132

Kevin 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…

I don't agree with Kevin. It's true that you can function without programming, but it's also true that being able to program could improve pretty much any job. Even a janitor could develop, say, a logistics application to optimize his path through the building he cleans, or build a roomba to vacuum for him. And more broadly, I really do think programming improves the quality of my thoughts. I remember when I was 10 o…

This is really absurd. Most janitors are paid by the hour. Why would someone engineer their paycheck away? You obviously don't want to spend a real long time doing your job less get fired or be seen slacking off. However if you were paid to clean a school after school and had a set task and you engineered a 4 hour job into a 1 hour job, EXCELLENT you just cut 3 quarters of your paycheck away.

Why would you build a roomba when you can buy one?

Have you ever used a roomba? You'd need like 500 of them to cover enough ground for a school or a store and they'd have to run overnight and avoid falling down the stairs if you were in school and good luck finding them all the next day.

There's a whole custodial industry that has already thought of and solved many problems and perhaps they do things the way they do because that's the best solution, because roomba may be good for a room in a house but bad for a whole school

If you had set hours, you still wouldn't want to optimize your route. I know that the time goes by much faster if I'm busy and doing work than if I'm sitting around with no work to do. Nobody wants to walk around and see employees sitting around doing nothing, that's a good way to get fired. People complain. Your hours get cut. Your paycheck gets cut.

I had a job in high school that was awful because between the hours of 2 and 4 there was nothing to do. Two hours felt like a whole lifetime. I tried to make up work like scrubbing walls and stuff but I couldn't do that all the time because the walls were dirty once. It would have just been fine if I had some friggin work at that time.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#412

Post by jameshart » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 1:57 PM UTC

Crito wrote: post #68

pmiller2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "learn basic electrical engineering" Because when, outside of work and hobbies, have you ever found it useful to know basic EE? Unless you're rewiring houses on a regular basis, I can't really think of a common situation where you'd need this type of knowledge. OTOH and IMHO, everybody should know how to use a computer and have at least a rudimentary idea what the thing is capable of. Edit: Actually, rewiring house…

A basic understanding of the physics of electricity will give you helpful insight into countless things in your everyday life; you likely don't notice this because you take such a basic understanding for granted. For example, understanding resistance current and voltage will allow you to reason about the efficiency of different sort of light bulbs (the package will give you the numbers and tell you it is good, but co…

Don't know anything about the contemporary curriculum in US high schools, but my secondary education in physics included the basics of AC, DC, semiconducters and fundamental digital electronics, sufficient to help me fault-find a busted LED in a string of christmas lights this past weekend.

If schools aren't teaching circuits, V=IR and P=IV, I agree they should. But I'm pretty sure in many cases they are, so you're arguing with a straw man.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#413

Post by collyw » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 1:58 PM UTC

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…

I work with bioinformatics, who are generally fairly smart, and self taught coders. The quality of code they produce is often terrible. Having to interact with some of that code is painful, and it is often easier just to rewrite "properly".

I think it would be far more use to encourage people to learn how an OS works, and understand the concepts (rather than blindly clicking things until it does what you want). Understand some database concepts. Understand a bit about how the internet works.

I am often asked to fix problems with Excel or Word, despite the fact I work on a Linux box, and don't touch either of these pieces of software given the choice. I can make things like that work (some of the time), not because I have any training in how to use them, but because I understand some underlying concepts that non-technical users don't. Teaching these things would be of far more use than teaching people how to write some basic scripts.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#414

Post by collyw » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 2:05 PM UTC

memset wrote: post #363

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…

Let's assume you're paying a developer $100k per year - not atypical in this day and age. As a business, I want that developer, who is likely making more than anyone else in the organization, to be working on "the most important thing" in our business at a given time. This might mean a new checkout flow, making sure the online shopping cart works, or scaling a website to accomodate 1000 users at once. There are many…

As a counter argument to that, many of the non-technical users in my organization like Excel. We have wasted countless hours by sticking to excel as a data input / manipulation tool, as it is incredibly error prone. Non technical users don't see the difference between a 2 and "2" and a " 2". It looks right to them, and much of the time they seem incapable of reading a sensible error message and fixing it the problem themselves.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#415

Post by collyw » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 2:08 PM UTC

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.

IT support apparently used this method in this in the last place I worked.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

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Post by collyw » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 2:11 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #360

chaz wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the value of learning to code is learning how to break down complex problems into simpler steps, determining the order in which those steps need to happen, and thinking carefully about your upfront needs to get some the desired, distant result. Coding isn't the only place to learn these skills. For example, working in a commercial kitchen, you might learn these skills quickly: what do I need to do make this d…

>>I think the value of learning to code is learning how to break down complex problems into simpler steps How is that any different than any other branch of engineering? Repairing a car engine requires thinking and application of effort that is the very same as that required in programming/debugging. Same with building a house. Or fixing tube lights.

I see car repair more like hardware repair on a computer. Graphic chip fried, pull out the graphic card, and pout in a new one. Certainly doesn't require the levels of abstraction that I use in my day to day work building / maintaining the database for an organization.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

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Post by kamjam » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 2:20 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #351

kamjam wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly, I presume you mean because it is not phonetic? But that is not going to be so easy to change... My biggest gripe of the modern school leavers is when dey ryt n txt spch & i hv 2 decifa evry wrd. That's ok in an actual text message, but I've heard of stories where it has been carried over to exams, CV's and the workplace. Anyway, that's what grinds my gears :)

Oh, that's mostly a failure to communicate in the prestige dialect of English.

You seem to have a big gripe about the English language. There is nothing prestige about it, some of the upper class may like to pretend there is but it's just a means of communication like every other language and I would make the same observations about those too.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#418

Post by easy_rider » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 2:20 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #407

memset wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume you're paying a developer $100k per year - not atypical in this day and age. As a business, I want that developer, who is likely making more than anyone else in the organization, to be working on "the most important thing" in our business at a given time. This might mean a new checkout flow, making sure the online shopping cart works, or scaling a website to accomodate 1000 users at once. There are many…

Perhaps a side effect of "everybody" learning to program will be the demand for more programming tools that are easy to use. Excel and VBA both developed due to use demand. I've seen lots of people, from engineers to workers on the loading dock, use Excel to create convenient tools for their own use.

My client, he doesn't know what "FTP" is, and does not know how to upload his revised version of the current Excel calculation sheet which he designed, and is core-business, and coupled to an application form. He knows the ins and outs about Excel, from formulas to shortcuts, and i'm a total novice when he's explaining stuff to me.

I'm interfacing with his Excel sheet through PHP, and he does not have to change the way he works, and I don't. I don't need to know all the ins-and outs, I just need to know which cell needs what data, and the cells that are calculated and need to extract data from.

I'm now building a management backend for him in Rails, and it will work the same way. Maybe later those Excel calculations will be ported to the database, but for now there is no reason to bother my client with learning a new interface and changing the way he works.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#419

Post by kamjam » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 2:25 PM UTC

ivanca wrote: post #406

patio11 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a classical education in computer science, an engineering degree, and plus/minus about a decade in my coding skill being a major contributing factor in my ability to eat on a daily basis. On the one hand, I concur with you, in that ability to produce a working system ex nihlio is both a) much, much harder than anyone suggesting the general populance Just Learn To Code expects and b) of limited utility to man…

I don't aggre on programming not helping the very poor people, just as some examples: Just scrapping a website that contains all the free charities in my area to put it in a single page to print. Getting little jobs on freelancer-programmers-marketplace such as "elance" Creating a blog where he writes tips about how to survive with extremely low income and sharing tips about it in the comment section. Helping out oth…

Everything you mention can be done by a non-programmer.

- Copy and paste your list of charities into MS Word and print it - Not sure what that is about - Create a blog on one of the many readily available platforms like Wordpress or blogger. Plenty of non-coders already doing this - Getting a grasp on technology has nothing to do with coding

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#420

Post by userbinator » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 2:32 PM UTC

rolux wrote: post #247

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…

Just like the "prescribed foreign language course in middle school", a bit of programming practice may widen your horizon, and help demystify these seemingly opaque machines and networks. It's about practice, not "knowledge" per se. Basic tasks, like: I have a folder full of files, how do I get the filenames into a text file or e-mail? Five-liners in high-level languages, the equivalent of asking for directions in a…

And that's something that can be done in a single line at the terminal in Windows, OS X, or *nix. Learning how to use that effectively before learning how to code would already be a big step.