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Historically, the kids who'll become really good programmers don't have to be exposed to it before college. They'll already have started programming before they
by teeja 17y ago
Historically, the kids who'll become really good programmers don't have to be exposed to it before college. They'll already have started programming before they're in high school. If they're really drawn to it, noone will be able to keep them away from it that long.
In my experience it's not a question of exposure, it's a question of the pay being offered. Most programmers that kids know probably don't make very much money. That could be changed if there was more exposure for those who greatly enjoy and profit from the craft.
- blahedo 17y agoI thought about that; the issue is not that one must have a college course to get started on programming, or that a course in secondary or primary school is the only pre-college exposure people could have. It's that of all students in college, a very small percentage of them have any exposure to programming. And I think we can safely assume that the percentage would be an order of magnitude lower among students that never make it to college (which still describes a majority of people---attending college for even a day puts you in a minority). By contrast, even the most NCLB-starved schools tend to have some art and music programs, even if they're cut way back, and virtually everyone has some (perhaps inadequate) PE classes and access to pickup games of basketball or stickball or whatever. There's really no imminent chance of the number of people who have done "some" programming coming within two orders of magnitude of the number of people who have done "some" art or played "some" sports.