The recent free courses from Pluralsight on teaching kids to program really got me thinking about this subject.
There seems to be a big backlash in development community against the idea that everyone should learn to program.
I’m not sure exactly where it is coming from, but I suspect it has something to do with egos and fear.
Even within the development community, there seems to be a distinction between “real programmers,” and “not real programmers,” based on language or technology choice.I have to admit, I have been guilty of this type of thinking myself, because a very easy way to increase our own value is to decrease the value of others.
But what I have come to find is that not only is the distinction between “real programmers” and “not real programmers” a false dichotomy, but that the distinction between a programmer at all and a layperson, is also not quite as clear, or at least it shouldn’t be.
Not everyone should be a programmer
It’s true. Just like not everyone should be an accountant, or not everyone should be a writer, but I think we can all agree, that everyone should understand basic math and be able to write.
Learning how to program and doing it professionally are two distinct things and they should not be lumped together.
It it pretty hard to imagine a working world where no one except writers could write.
Imagine wanting to send an email to your boss, but you don’t know how to write, so you have to ask the company writer to do it for you.
That is what the world would be like if we insisted that only writers needed to learn how to write.
But perhaps you think I am just being silly, I mean the need to write is so prevalent in everyday situations, but the need to program isn’t.
But I challenge you to consider if whether it is actually true that the need to write is much more prevalent than the need to program, or because everyone knows how to write, the need for writing is just recognized more.
Imagine if everyone you interacted with on a daily basis knew how to write code. Imagine that, just like everyone has a word processor on their computer that they know how to use, there was an IDE that allowed them to write simple scripts.
Think about how that changes the world.
a>
Wednesday, 1 January 2014
Programmer
The recent free courses from Pluralsight on teaching kids to program really got me thinking about this subject.
There seems to be a big backlash in development community against the idea that everyone should learn to program.
I’m not sure exactly where it is coming from, but I suspect it has something to do with egos and fear.
Even within the development community, there seems to be a distinction between “real programmers,” and “not real programmers,” based on language or technology choice.I have to admit, I have been guilty of this type of thinking myself, because a very easy way to increase our own value is to decrease the value of others.
But what I have come to find is that not only is the distinction between “real programmers” and “not real programmers” a false dichotomy, but that the distinction between a programmer at all and a layperson, is also not quite as clear, or at least it shouldn’t be.
Not everyone should be a programmer
It’s true. Just like not everyone should be an accountant, or not everyone should be a writer, but I think we can all agree, that everyone should understand basic math and be able to write.
Learning how to program and doing it professionally are two distinct things and they should not be lumped together.
It it pretty hard to imagine a working world where no one except writers could write.
Imagine wanting to send an email to your boss, but you don’t know how to write, so you have to ask the company writer to do it for you.
That is what the world would be like if we insisted that only writers needed to learn how to write.
But perhaps you think I am just being silly, I mean the need to write is so prevalent in everyday situations, but the need to program isn’t.
But I challenge you to consider if whether it is actually true that the need to write is much more prevalent than the need to program, or because everyone knows how to write, the need for writing is just recognized more.
Imagine if everyone you interacted with on a daily basis knew how to write code. Imagine that, just like everyone has a word processor on their computer that they know how to use, there was an IDE that allowed them to write simple scripts.
Think about how that changes the world.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment