211–220 of 368 posts
"If you’re old enough to remember DOS, you know what a command line is." This is a joke right?
Ignoring the content, the structure of this article is amazing. It feels like an entire magazine in a single essay. The background animations that change as you scroll, the contextual content (try scrolling really fast). I'm not even all that keen on the bright oversaturated aesthetic, but it's just so cool. I'd love to see a short piece on how they made it.
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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…
> Many coders would do well to read a similar article, if there was one, called, "What is Society?" There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. I feel you here a whole bunch.
It is absolutely unreasonable. The average person has no clue who the vice president happens to be ... so why should software developers?
We can complain about how clueless average people are, sure, but there's no reason to apply a higher standard to software developers.
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…
Maybe instead of ridiculing the majority of people who don't understand what we do, we should celebrate a piece like this that makes an effort to educate. Maybe instead of lamenting their ignorance, we should commend the VPs and everyone else with enough curiosity about code to make it through this behemoth of an article.
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> Many coders would do well to read a similar article, if there was one, called, "What is Society?" There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. I feel you here a whole bunch.
> There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. It is absolutely unreasonable. The average person has no clue who the vice president happens to be ... so why should software developers? We can complain about how clueless average people are, sure, but there's no reason to apply a higher standard to so…
Most smart, educated people I know can name the vice president of the United States, and I don't even live in the US. I think it's completely unreasonable for someone not to know who the vice president of the country they live in is.
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This is incidentally a weakness in the US education system. You split schools into elementary-middle-high (for no especial reason) then treat it all as 'grade school'. In every European country I've lived in schools are generally split into primary and secondary. Primary school teachers are general educators whose primary skill is teaching but who do not need advanced knowledge in any particular subject. They usually…
The US works pretty similar to how you indicate Europe works: 1-6 (or 7 in some places) is taught single teacher who probably majored in education with the whole class (with maybe a once a week art or muisc class taught by a specialist if the school is well funded). 7 or 8 through 12th is taught with 6-8 subjects a day (or in some places 3-4 subjects with alternating days having different subjects) with teachers who…
I love how the page calls you out for skimming it instead of reading it.
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…
'But no one told me I needed to know this' stops being an excuse as of adulthood, if not earlier. Anyone who cares what coding is only needs curiosity and an internet connection, the web is full of introductory material for almost every level from almost every angle. If a professional in the current world doesn't know 'what coding is', they just don't care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that Parent made the observation that it is sad that in our information society people (in responsible positions (regarding ICT)) don't know about the fundamentals of the information society. At least, that's what I took from it and I concur. 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.…
Another anecdote. In 2015 my teenager will start High School in a small, rural , school district and each student has a Chromebook. No, I don't know what they will be used for besides googling information, but times are changing. I emphasized small and rural for a reason.
- are teachers able to choose, remix, adapt, or make new "computational" instructional materials like they are able to do with conventional instructional materials? (Stencilling and xeroxing for the win :-)
- are computers only used as supporting tools (i.e., typewriter, encyclopedia, drawing board, ...) or is computational thinking integral part of the curriculum?
- is there software like programming tools, CAS (such as maxima, or matlab, or mathematica), CAD, and other configurable and programmable professional tools available? (and will they be used beyond a module of two weeks here or there?)
- has the (core) curriculum changed at al or are we still teaching topics like it is 1982? Computer technology makes it possible for students to tackle complex authentic problems instead of "school problems" (Death to linearity! Away with nice round numbers!)