President Obama calls on every American to learn code • Hacker News Board

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#421

Post by hatu » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 2:55 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #414

memset wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume you're paying a developer $100k per year - not atypical in this day and age. As a business, I want that developer, who is likely making more than anyone else in the organization, to be working on "the most important thing" in our business at a given time. This might mean a new checkout flow, making sure the online shopping cart works, or scaling a website to accomodate 1000 users at once. There are many…

As a counter argument to that, many of the non-technical users in my organization like Excel. We have wasted countless hours by sticking to excel as a data input / manipulation tool, as it is incredibly error prone. Non technical users don't see the difference between a 2 and "2" and a " 2". It looks right to them, and much of the time they seem incapable of reading a sensible error message and fixing it the problem…

I've also noticed this countless of times. If you leave data sets to be designed by a non-engineer - it will cost you hours and hours of parsing and changing the format constantly depending on who slapped the excel sheet together. Literally one of the worst experiences on a job was dealing with a big corporations excel sheets and trying to convert them into usable data.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#422

Post by Tycho » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 3:05 PM UTC

grellas wrote: post #217

Speaking as a non-coder, but as one who did minimal things with programming-like higher-level stuff ranging from the old DOS batch files to VBA and some dabbling with SQL, I am curious whether real engineers believe the idea of broad literacy in coding truly would be valuable and, if so, how exactly. I am not speaking as a skeptic, just as one who does not readily see the point and wants to know. Of course, we are in…

Maybe the question should be: why should we teach trigonometry over programming? Which one is more likely to be useful to your career and life in the modern world?

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#423

Post by memset » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 3:15 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #414

memset wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume you're paying a developer $100k per year - not atypical in this day and age. As a business, I want that developer, who is likely making more than anyone else in the organization, to be working on "the most important thing" in our business at a given time. This might mean a new checkout flow, making sure the online shopping cart works, or scaling a website to accomodate 1000 users at once. There are many…

As a counter argument to that, many of the non-technical users in my organization like Excel. We have wasted countless hours by sticking to excel as a data input / manipulation tool, as it is incredibly error prone. Non technical users don't see the difference between a 2 and "2" and a " 2". It looks right to them, and much of the time they seem incapable of reading a sensible error message and fixing it the problem…

Doesn't this imply that, with stronger engineering education, the problems you describe (which arise from poor engineering) would be eliminated?

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#424

Post by araes » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 3:28 PM UTC

NamTaf wrote: post #354

hooande wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, our educational system is centered around the idea of exposure to potentially worthless experiences. Everyone knows people who haven't had to think about concepts from trigonometry or algebra 2 since school. Children are required to take music classes, art classes, physed. We don't teach these things because they are practically useful in any way, but because 1 out of every N kids discovers that…

I disagree completely that they're potentially worthless experiences geared only for the 1 in N who embrace the subject. The content of the material is in many cases mostly irrelevant - it's the fundamentals behind that content that matters. Claiming that it 'doesn't matter' because you don't actively utilise it in your job later on misses the point entirely. For example: Maths - teaches logic and critical analysis o…

Very nice answer and much appreciated. One additional bit which I only saw lightly touched on is the correlation between breadth of knowledge and general intelligence / creativity. Exposure to a wide range of subjects helps build the mental linkages for students so that they can form the equivalent of mental analogies about new material and solve new problems by reference to solutions in other areas. Coding has a lot of potential in this area, as the fundamental concepts of algorithms and machine logic are broadly applicable to a wide range of subjects. In addition, the solutions you see in programming (barnes hutt trees, steepest decent, network theory, binary search, ect...) are optimized solutions to fundamental questions of how the world works. Once those solutions have been seen in programming, the understanding of the world they communicate can then be taken and applied to comprehend and solve problems in other areas of life.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#425

Post by walshemj » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 3:34 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #404

walshemj wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do US schools not have "shop" class that teaches this I certainly did wood and metalwork and technical drawing at my UK school.

Not exactly. Those used to focus on "actually doing stuff" and tradesman type careers, which about half the grads eventually end up doing after dropping out of super expensive university. Socially that has an incredible negative opinion over the past few years (lots of marketing by the .edu and banking complex to spend more on schooling). So between irrational hatred of the trades and liability costs and/or insurance…

Well learning the basics of technical drawing isometric views etc is till useful whether you use a pencil or auto cad.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#426

Post by walshemj » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 3:47 PM UTC

wes-exp wrote: post #292

walshemj wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that system rigidly streamed kids at an early age and until recently once on the apprenticeship track it limited your progression.

I have to believe that there is a happy medium somewhere between prematurely categorizing kids and trying to make every single person to learn to code and obtain a 4-year STEM degree.

Might be better for the USA to use the British system and have kids specialize at 16 and reduce the standard degree to 3 years (seems to work for Cambridge and Oxford) thats a 25% saving in costs right there.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#427

Post by sonabinu » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 4:05 PM UTC

kamjam wrote: post #419

ivanca wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't aggre on programming not helping the very poor people, just as some examples: Just scrapping a website that contains all the free charities in my area to put it in a single page to print. Getting little jobs on freelancer-programmers-marketplace such as "elance" Creating a blog where he writes tips about how to survive with extremely low income and sharing tips about it in the comment section. Helping out oth…

Everything you mention can be done by a non-programmer. - Copy and paste your list of charities into MS Word and print it - Not sure what that is about - Create a blog on one of the many readily available platforms like Wordpress or blogger. Plenty of non-coders already doing this - Getting a grasp on technology has nothing to do with coding

What if your list is 10,000 and they are links on a paginated search results page? Cut and paste does not work here -scrapping sure will. Now think about what happens if the page is supported by dynamic tools like AJAX ?

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#428

Post by ConceptJunkie » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 4:26 PM UTC

moistgorilla wrote: post #220

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. Knowing it could be done would have been good enough for her, because then she would have known to ask someone to help her. If you have at least an idea of what's possible, you can then have a good idea when it makes sense to ask the expert to give you a little help. She certainly would never _need_ to know how to do it herself, although there's nothing wrong with that. If she were asking the expert for s…

I think you are confusing things. Nobody wants the entire world to be CS experts. What most people are advocating is that an entry level CS course be given to all students. Just how we make them take Chemistry, Physics, literature.

No, I'm not confusing things, I'm trying to suggest that even just understanding what basic coding can provide would be of a lot of benefit to people. I think having everyone take a basic CS course is a fine idea.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#429

Post by patja » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 4:42 PM UTC

I don't get the controversy. I don't see this as being about making everyone into a professional programmer, no more than having every student take music class will make them a professional musician. I believe it is more about the ancillary benefits in opening up new ways of problem solving, and having some rudimentary awareness of the inner workings of a world that one might otherwise never have the chance to explore.

Some students will catch the bug and tear off on their own journey of independent learning and discovery and create great things. But for most it will just be a new dimension of a full and well-rounded primary education. The problem is that the current generation of educators and schools are largely wholly unequipped to do this, so we have to step up and help out.

I ran an after school "Tech Club" for a couple of years at my kids K-8 school. This year the administration asked me to bring it into the classroom and I am teaching 100% of the students in grades 6 - 8 basic programming with Scratch. It is just one 45 minute class per week, with each grade getting the class for one trimester (12 - 13 weeks). You can't do a whole lot in this time, but you can definitely do something, a whole lot more than the school was doing with technology before.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#430

Post by rhizome » Tue, Dec 10, 2013, 6:19 PM UTC

elheffe80 wrote: post #379

chii wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this particular example, the creators of the OS has thought of the function, and implemented it. But what about a slightly different one? E.g. I have two folders, each a bunch of files. Are there any files that are not in both folders?

diff -r dir1/ dir2/ edit: I did not know this- I just posted it because it is but one answer. For what it is worth, I agree with you- basic knowledge of programming is something everyone should know.

The thing is, diff and "get a list of filenames into an email/textfile" is not programming.