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Coding - the new Latin

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Coding - the new Latin

#51

Post by randomdata »

wcarss wrote: post #49
randomdata wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does everyone really need to know about recursion? Recursion is taught in gym class through the game of dodgeball. Consider the following C-like pseudocode: void throw(int *ball, int hits) { if (hits The question then becomes, do people need to learn specific computer languages, or is teaching the underlying concepts in abstract ways enough?

Edit: I began writing this before a different post appeared with the same point. Alas! I'm sorry to be a jerk, but I found your code pretty tough to decipher. Here's my thought process: NUMBER_OF_PLAYERS could be, say, 6. the caller calls: throw(ball, 0); 0 So, what is ball? It's either an integer and you're just passing its address around for no particular reason, or it's an integer array and you're using angle() to…

> Ball is a terrible name for the list of the positions of the players.

From a code maintainability point of view, yes. I would never write code like this for a real application. However, for analogizing the game in code, I have to strongly disagree.

Ball is not a list of players. It is, just as in the game, a pointer to a location in space. Players may or may not occupy that space. If the player does, a hit occurs. The hit test is based on the intersection of the location in space and the occupation of that space.

I chose to represent my code in a C-like manner because it makes that spacial representation easy to write. People are not thinking about the game in terms of lists and objects, that I am sure.

Re: Coding - the new Latin

#52

Post by sethg »

randomdata wrote: post #37
tpatke wrote: post #19

When I think about all of the problems with the education system I am not sure that "teaching coding" would top that list. The bottom line is that coding is a profession which is not suited to everyone. I remember being a TA at university in the late 90s when IT was booming. Everyone wanted to learn to program. Once they learned enough to realize it meant sitting in front of a computer alone all day - most moved on t…

> Does everyone really need to know about recursion? Recursion is taught in gym class through the game of dodgeball. Consider the following C-like pseudocode: void throw(int *ball, int hits) { if (hits The question then becomes, do people need to learn specific computer languages, or is teaching the underlying concepts in abstract ways enough?

I thought recursion was taught in music class, through the song about the old lady who swallowed a fly.

Re: Coding - the new Latin

#53

Post by sethg »

cletus wrote: post #43
tezza wrote: post #39

Who here studied Latin? Well I did Latin for 6 years in High School (Sydney Boys fyi). I find this title "Coding - the new Latin" as a bizarre way of inducing people to learn to code. Latin is dead. Very dead. Back in my day Latin was billed as "The Fastest Growing Language", but that never transpired. Now if you want to read Caesar, Virgil, Catulus et al, then fine learn Latin. But Latin is no longer the ticket to a…

I believe you're missing the point. Here are some historical uses of Latin: - Obviously it was the language of the Roman Empire; - It is the basis for many European languages; - It was the language of Christianity, the Papacy for thousands of years (tying in somewhat historically with the conversion of Constantine). This went so far as Roman Catholic services being held in Latin until IIRC the 1960s; - Prior to the p…

I agree with your factual statements, but my immediate reaction to “coding is the new Latin” is “does this person mean that coding is a skill which is fairly useless for its own sake, but signals to other people that you have mastered a complicated formal system and therefore deserve admission to the club of the elite?”

Re: Coding - the new Latin

#54

Post by sethg »

tpatke wrote: post #19

When I think about all of the problems with the education system I am not sure that "teaching coding" would top that list. The bottom line is that coding is a profession which is not suited to everyone. I remember being a TA at university in the late 90s when IT was booming. Everyone wanted to learn to program. Once they learned enough to realize it meant sitting in front of a computer alone all day - most moved on t…

Remember that a lot of people who don’t code as a profession end up doing it as part of their work (just as a lot of people who do not have “writer” in their job titles, and who didn’t major in English, end up doing a lot of writing for their jobs).

One of the most horrifying pieces of Perl I had to work on was written by a biologist who knew just enough Perl to translate certain information from File Format A to File Format B. Or at least, he thought he knew just enough Perl....

A lot of businesses depend on complicated Excel spreadsheets whose authors don’t realize that they are programming.

Re: Coding - the new Latin

#55

Post by guard-of-terra »

berntb wrote: post #42
wingo wrote: post #10

It is important, but I prefer Eben Moglen's analogy: "Software is what the 21st century is made of. What steel was to the economy of the 20th century, what steel was to the power of the 20th century, what steel was to the politics of the 20th century, software is now. It is the crucial building block, the component out of which everything else is made, and, when I speak of everything else, I mean of course freedom, a…

Check the total number of steel workers as percentage of the work force in the year 1900 to a hundred years later. Very much less. My personal lesson from this, is that computer software jobs in general might soon have the hourly pay of PHP coders on elance. (Then the cycle of few people studying computer science will repeat... like ten years ago.)

What makes you think "soon"?

It's obvious that in some distant point of future programming will cease to be The hot thing to do, but what makes you think it might be soon enough for us to see it?

Re: Coding - the new Latin

#56

Post by _exec »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #16
itmag wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would probably create a whole new class called "thinking 101" or something. It should teach: -numeracy: how much is 1 million/1 billion/1 trillion, etc. -common cognitive biases. -logical fallacies. -basic science. -basic coding. -De Bono's 6 thinking hats. -how the brain works. -meditation (ie not thinking). -how to learn stuff faster and better. -how to remember stuff: memory palace and the like. -etc I could thi…

Sounds like you are reinventing the ExPhil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examen_philosophicum

Interesting. Do you have any idea what kind of topics the course teaches? Is there a list online?

Re: Coding - the new Latin

#57

Post by _exec »

itmag wrote: post #13
lclarkmichalek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest way would be to shove computing under the maths curriculum. Teach if with guard statements, and skip for, teach recursion. by the time the kids get to sixth form, have a mathmatical computation course where you teach them to apply their knowledge to a language like haskell that mirrors mathmatical notation quite well.

I would probably create a whole new class called "thinking 101" or something. It should teach: -numeracy: how much is 1 million/1 billion/1 trillion, etc. -common cognitive biases. -logical fallacies. -basic science. -basic coding. -De Bono's 6 thinking hats. -how the brain works. -meditation (ie not thinking). -how to learn stuff faster and better. -how to remember stuff: memory palace and the like. -etc I could thi…

I'd definitely be interested in reading the full list :) Any more suggestions?

Re: Coding - the new Latin

#58

Post by nobody314159265 »

Coding - the new maths! Students are dropping IT in schools - good. Not taking IT at college probably also good.

IT in schools has (and always will be) crap. The problem is that nobody has any idea what to teach. When it started in the early 80s we drew flowcharts and wrote programs in Basic then did exams on the definitions of a mainframe, mini and microcomputer.

Then it gradually evolved to 'useful' skills - so IT today is how to format word documents and create powerpoint slides. If the brightest students are dropping this - then there is some hope for the future.

Similarly most CS course (except of course your favourite Uni) have become "teach Java in 21weeks" - repeat for 3years.

Re: Coding - the new Latin

#59

Post by Jun8 »

tezza wrote: post #39

Who here studied Latin? Well I did Latin for 6 years in High School (Sydney Boys fyi). I find this title "Coding - the new Latin" as a bizarre way of inducing people to learn to code. Latin is dead. Very dead. Back in my day Latin was billed as "The Fastest Growing Language", but that never transpired. Now if you want to read Caesar, Virgil, Catulus et al, then fine learn Latin. But Latin is no longer the ticket to a…

I also think you're missing the point, but not in the sense that cletus talks about. Learning Latin rewires your brain, i.e. it opens your eye to certain modes of communication and expression that you didn't know existed. I don't know Latin but learned Ancient Greek during my Linguistics MA, and was by how some Linguistics concepts are "implemented" in that language. My English monolingual classmates minds were blown by things like noun cases and the vocative. That is why you learn those languages (arguably Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, or any other language with a rich history also fits the bill).

In this sense, learning Latin or Greek is similar to learning Lisp: sure you'll not use it in your daily life (I know, many will differ on that), but, boy, does it open your mind up.

Unfortunately, these languages are taught by people who are generally English majors, not Linguistics or CS majors and so focus on the literature as opposed to cool grammar. The goal of my two semesters of Greek was just as a prelude to read Plato, so everything was jammed down your throat. I was surprised to learn that our TA, who was writing his PhD dissertation on Ancient Greek drama didn't know how to say "it's raining" or the name of the color green. Think of learning English just to read Shakespeare!

Re: Coding - the new Latin

#60

Post by Jun8 »

tpatke wrote: post #19

When I think about all of the problems with the education system I am not sure that "teaching coding" would top that list. The bottom line is that coding is a profession which is not suited to everyone. I remember being a TA at university in the late 90s when IT was booming. Everyone wanted to learn to program. Once they learned enough to realize it meant sitting in front of a computer alone all day - most moved on t…

The answer to your question is a very easy YES! Think about it: isn't your question isomorphic to "do all students need high school algebra", "if you're not become a historian do you still needs to know all those details from the history class" and countless others. Some of these questions do have merit (how many among the HN crowd remembers or cares about how photosynthesis works or sin^2 + cos^2 = 1) bu they miss the point: those topics are there to open your brain to ideas, mental weigh lifting if you will. In this sense you most definitely need to teach recursion and coding concepts.

Coding (especially for high schoolers) doesn't have to be "sitting in front of a computer alone all day", in fact if this is how it's presented that's totally the wrong approach. That comes in the pro stage. At he early stage you have to stress the creative and social aspects of coding.

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