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Please don't learn to code

codinghorror.com

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Re: Please don't learn to code

#11

Post by marcusf »

I doubt Bloomberg uses eight grade chemistry, biology or physics in his day job either. We still teach the sciences -- if nothing else than as a way to entice kids to continue studying it and keeping a steady influx of engineers in to society. There is nothing different about computation, per se. Instead of a teacher droning on to kids about how to surf, let them learn how to do webpages, or robots. Get them excited about CS and try to disspel the notion that the machine they're sitting by is in any way, shape or form magical and archaic.

As for Bloomberg at this phase in his life picking up coding, probably not. On the other hand, he made his fortune in part via hardware and software, so I doubt he's completely clueless about it even now.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#12

Post by maebert »

I respectfully disagree. Learning to read is a necessary skill where most of the world's information is written - but to be productive, to create, to contribute, you have to learn to write. Code is the same: whether that's a good thing or not, more and more of your surrounding, of your environment will depend on - code. Fortunately, a lot of services have made it very easy to contribute to this augmented world without coding yourself, but you will not be able to understand the basic mechanics of this augmented environment without basic code literacy.

Why should a mayor learn to code? Well, I don't expect him to be a Java nut, but I do expect leaders in politics to grasp the basics of privacy, security, productivity, cost and benefits of the coded world surrounding us.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#13

Post by losethos »

You BASIC example would be okay. Learning old-school BASIC could be a week-long set of workshops.

Plotting a graph, old school style can be useful.

10 HGR

20 HCOLOR=12

30 HLINE 100,100 to 100,200

40 FOR X = 1 to 300

50 HPLOT X,0.01XX

60 NEXT X

Doing operations on text files can be useful -- I have a nice program for processing my web-site log files. It has to be custom, absolutely.

What's one week of workshops?

God says... C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT

ter: 14:7 And he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field.

14:8 And he that is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean: and after that he shall come into the camp, and shall tarry abroad out of his tent seven days.

14:9 But it shall be on the seventh day, that he shall shave all his hair off his hea

Re: Please don't learn to code

#14

Post by shin_lao »

I don't like this post and what it implies.

If tomorrow you want to learn to cook, how would you feel if a master chef told you "No, don't. You'll never be as good as me. If you're hungry, come to my restaurant instead".

I think there's nothing wrong with learning a new skill, whoever you are, whatever you do.

Learning new skills is what makes us human.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#16

Post by arethuza »

I would hope that someone who has tried their hand at creating a working program might appreciate, even in a very limited way, what kinds of issues face those of us who have to create these systems for a living: the difficulties of gathering requirements, the non-obvious relationship between the apparent complexity of a bug/feature and what it will take to implement/fix etc.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#17

Post by blackhole »

Almost all of these arguments can be applied to a large majority of our school curriculum. If you are arguing that people shouldn't learn to code for the sake of learning to code, you are correct. If, however, you don't actually think learning to code translates to solving problems, or has any real world benefit, you should also be insisting we remove all of Math from our school curriculum, because who uses anything beyond basic algebra? Hell, who uses anything beyond basic arithmetic now that we have calculators that can do algebra and calculus for us? Why teach kids anything?

I should also point out that, the more politicians know how to code, the less politicians treat computers as black boxes that "the nerds" need to perform magic with. It won't go away, certainly, but its a step in the right direction.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#18

Post by zwischenzug »

exDM69 wrote: post #2

I recently learned how to plumb a little. Now I can do minor household plumbing fixes without having to hire professional help. A very useful skill indeed. I know it's a demanding activity that requires more than reading a book and knowing how to hold a wrench, so I know to stay away from the serious pipes and stick to little fixes.

It's strange he made that point about plumbing, then later said you should learn how things work to solve real problems.

He seems to have confused an initiative among some people to learn a new skill in their spare time with a totalitarian injunction that we all become programmers.

To me it's no different to an initiative among people to learn a foreign language. It may be a somewhat qiuxotic spare-time hobby, but the prospect of acceptable failure is partly what part-time hobbies are for, right?

Learning a bit of coding will give one an insight into how hard it is to get right, which will make one appreciate which bits are easy and which bits are hard. What's wrong with that?

The little plumbing I've learned on my own initiative has taught me similar, and I'm less likely to get ripped off as a result.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#19

Post by nicholassmith »

That's like a mathematician saying "people shouldn't learn maths!". Of course they should, it teaches you other skills on top of learning maths. Are most people going to go on to learn cryptography or crack one of the Unsolved Puzzles of Maths? Of course not, they'll leave it where they are and have new skills and new ways of solving problems.

Of course they could be one of the minority and go on to solve one of the big problems and create huge amounts of value. Which would be terrible.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#20

Post by tomstuart »

This is a depressingly philistine perspective.

A basic grasp of computational thinking has never been more important. It's become a prerequisite for making informed decisions about the world we live in.

The world may or may not need more working programmers (or mathematicians, novelists or plumbers), but why wouldn't we want to teach these elementary skills to as many people as possible?

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