Personal computers: does everyone need to learn programming? (1984)

Personal computers: does everyone need to learn programming? (1984)
nytimes.com

True, a lot of these arguments have been beaten to death but times do change though. Every now and then some fundamental assumption on which arguments are underpinned changes. Often times these changes come from other industries. It's worth re-assessing the basics from time to time.

Just a nitpick, but civil engineering is at least two orders of magnitude older since it goes back to Babylon.

The really cool thing about programming's scientific maturity is that it's entirely constructed. We know all the ground rules because we created them. The engineering challenge is not making a mess of things despite having a potentially perfect understanding of program semantics. So despite building aqueducts being a couple order of magnitudes older than building programs, we actually understand the abstract rules of programming better than we do hydrodynamics.

My mother purchased my first computer (an Apple ][e from the local Macy's) in 1983. We didn't have much money to purchase software. I didn't even understand there was a software industry, let alone where I might purchase it.

But that computer came furnished with some basic software that allowed one to write BASIC and, also, to use a mouse with a paint program (yes, before Macintosh debuted).

While his main point that not everyone need, nor should, learn to program computers, what Sandberg-Diment misses is the sheer size of the burgeoning home computer market and how the personal computer would revolutionize and fundamentally alter the world.

Reading "Personal computers: does everyone need to learn programming?" is slightly shocking for me me because having lived in that world, the difference between what Sandberg-Diment casually suggests and its real-world manifestation could have never been forecast.

Two examples:

> First, it allows you to develop software that is not available commercially, and in some cases it lets you customize purchased software to serve your specific needs better.

The ability to modify software "to serve your specific needs better" is a general gesture to client-side scripting, software consulting, and even FOSS. Linux did not exist in 1984 (Torvalds was 15 years old and his magnum opus was still 6 years away). Empires can (and did) fit in the gap between Sandberg-Diment's practical observation and the real-world consequences of software customizability.

Second:

> But does this mean that whoever wants to use a computer must also write the software for it? Would someone purchasing an automobile for a cross-country trip first study cartography, then proceed to obtain aerial and satellite photographs of the proposed route, and finally draw a detailed map for the whole journey? Hardly. It is far easier to go to the A.A.A. and get standard maps or that organization's special trip sheets.

How could anyone have known that a scant 30 years later (2010s) that people could have a pocket-sized computer which (for the most part) would obviate the use of paper maps for navigating to unknown destinations? That entire industries supporting the production of paper maps would be dramatically scaled back because of a globally-connected infrastructure involving microprocessor manufacturing, interface design, wireless communication, and (literal) rocket science would be publicly available to nearly all comers?

Sandberg-Diment's practical answer to "does everyone need to learn programming?" is comforting, persuasive, and correct. But the impractical answer--everyone should consider learning programming-- would be to catch a glimpse of the future and the massive transformations that widely available computing would bring inside a generation.