181–190 of 368 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worth noting -- it is roughly 38k words and is the longest piece ever published by Bloomberg.
Yes, it will tell you that at the end, and mock you if you arrive there too quickly to have read it all :).
It's 2015. The audience of this article shouldn't even exist. The reader, as described in the article, is a VP who has so little understanding about what it is his company does, that the only meaningful abstraction he can mentally picture is that of his employees "burning barrels of money". Imagine an auto company VP who says "I don't know anything about engines and drivetrains and all that technical stuff. All I kno…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're living in a pretty isolated world, my friend. I'd say 90% of my friends would be the audience for this. I've been coding 20 years, most of my friends are successful, grad-degree educated people in a variety of fields, and some of them are even my coworkers. Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's edu…
> Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's education system? Grade school teachers aren't expected to be specialists in the field they teach. They're expected to be specialists in teaching. Usually they have a bachelors (or masters) in education and maybe another degree, but it may or may not be the thing th…
Yeah, and this breaks down pretty fast, particularly when it comes to teaching the stuff you can't easily hand wave, e.g. science. Even at the middle/high school level, where teachers are supposed to have studied topic they teach at the undergraduate level in some capacity, you find plenty of foreign language teachers who are terrible speakers of the language they teach, or math teachers who basically have the same level of math as their students, with the distinction that they have access to the answers for the exercises they give. I spent some time in a US state university for grad school, and the level of some students who majored in education and later went on to teach was abysmal. It's hard to tell if the hegemony of standardized testing is the root or a symptom of the problem, but the overall picture is bleak.
This is precisely why if we want a great education system, we need to incentivize people who are practicing professionals first to then go teach. My best teachers in high school all shared those traits: a historian who had spent many years doing field research teaching history/geography, a geologist who was also a researcher for a major lab teaching natural sciences, etc.
Not everyone is made for teaching, but we as a society need to become much better at encouraging and enabling the people who enjoy it to teach in parallel to their professional activity (I would happily teach math from 8-10am before my day job 2-3 days a week if there was the structure for it.).
The people who want to become teachers just because they like kids but don't have any deep knowledge/understanding of any particular subject can teach kindergarten.
> There have been countless attempts to make software easier to write...Decades of efforts have gone into helping civilians write code...Nothing yet has done away with developers, developers, developers, developers. I still believe. Someday, somewhere, something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati.
I still believe. Someday, somewhere, something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati.
For example, think about what the NYTimes website looked like in February 2000:
http://web.archive.org/web/19990202013312/http://www3.nytimes.com/
But that site would never pass muster in 2015. Something 10x (if not 100x) more complex is required for NYTimes.com in 2015, plus various native apps, plus a subscription service, and so forth. So you still need a team of engineers...
____ [1] I'm talking about the act of putting the articles onto a website, not reporting and writing the articles, obviously.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're living in a pretty isolated world, my friend. I'd say 90% of my friends would be the audience for this. I've been coding 20 years, most of my friends are successful, grad-degree educated people in a variety of fields, and some of them are even my coworkers. Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's edu…
> Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's education system? Grade school teachers aren't expected to be specialists in the field they teach. They're expected to be specialists in teaching. Usually they have a bachelors (or masters) in education and maybe another degree, but it may or may not be the thing th…
It's 2015. The audience of this article shouldn't even exist. The reader, as described in the article, is a VP who has so little understanding about what it is his company does, that the only meaningful abstraction he can mentally picture is that of his employees "burning barrels of money". Imagine an auto company VP who says "I don't know anything about engines and drivetrains and all that technical stuff. All I kno…
You're living in a pretty isolated world, my friend. I'd say 90% of my friends would be the audience for this. I've been coding 20 years, most of my friends are successful, grad-degree educated people in a variety of fields, and some of them are even my coworkers. Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's edu…
We, as a society, should have started integrating computational thinking (Wing, 2006) as a core competency in the k-12 curriculum from the late 1980s onwards. We didn't.
anecdote
In 1991, I was in 5th grade, I saw the first computer enter the classroom in my primary school. It wasn't used but for some remedial mathematics training for a students or two and I believe the teacher did a computer course with it.
In 2010 I became a high school computer science teacher. There were three computer rooms (about 30 computers each) for the whole school (of about 1500 students) running windows XP + IE 6. Besides my class, the computer rooms were mostly used for making reports and "searching for information". Some departments did have specialized software installed (most of which came with the text books), but used it sparingly at best. On top of that, these software was mostly simple, inflexible, mostly non-interactive, non-collaborative, and "pre-fab" instructional materials. Often this software was not much more than a "digitized" version of parts of the text book with some animations, games, and procedural trainers mixed in.
As an outsider, I just love it when I read something presented as an introductory text and I'm confronted with an elaborate series of self-serving in-jokes that go "ha ha ha, ha ha ha, you don't know what I'm talking about!"
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Theres tons of successes, we just refuse to count them. Photoshop (as hinted in the article), is a super special purpose language for doing image operations. It no longer "looks" like coding, so we don't count it as coding for the masses. Excel is a much more general purpose language used by tons of "non-coders" (and arguably the most popular programming language on earth). Again, doesn't (often) look like normal pro…
Remember when search engines had Boolean operators?