I’ve come to appreciate how far up the “literacy” ladder software development is: Basic Literacy, Digital Literacy, Computational Thinking, Programming Languages… Those of us who’ve managed to speak the language, and to do so with any degree of fluency, are a relatively rare bunch. But I don’t believe for a moment that this stuff is “hard” to learn, so much as “inaccessible,” and therefore, exclusive. I like to compare the situation we have today to the scientific community in the 17th century, when Latin was the “language of science”. What’s the language of computer science? Well it’s Greek to the lay person (even if it is Ruby). Technical fields require a precision, but the net effect of all that jargon is just as dispossessing. Add to this the fact that software itself is invisible, compiled, minified, obfuscated, socked away on some corner of the internet, hiding behind a slick GUI, turtle turtles turtles all the way down, tea cups stacked, all the way up… It’s no wonder that it’s such a struggle to learn.
The flip side of all of this is an odd kind of colonialism 2.0, where our technology, with our QWERTY keyboards, and ASCII character sets, and the programming language itself are all spreading the English language like smallpox. But I digress.
Thank you MDN for the quality resources! It will be fun to see what happens if/when computational thinking really takes hold.