3 ms·

You can very easily live a meaningful, functional (pun intended), and literate life without ever getting into doing system configurations or writing HTML. If y

by yason 17y ago

You can very easily live a meaningful, functional (pun intended), and literate life without ever getting into doing system configurations or writing HTML. If you want to get your word out and communicate, you can do that as long as you can type. Having someone to fix your computer for you so that you can blog isn't illiteracy, nor learning to sign up to Gmail isn't comparable to learning to read and write. Or something else like that: the author was rather vague as for the technical skills he deemed to be required for literate modern life. But HTML "coding" sure as hell isn't one of them! Being a geek and being literate in "geek" language and thinking is a different thing from living a life. You might as well say that because cars are so ubiquitous and in countries with certain infrastructure they're almost mandatory, people need to know how they work and to fix them in order to be "literate", so that they can drive out and communicate with people instead of relying on more knowledgeable people to fix them for them.

drkevorkian 17y ago
The argument goes that understanding how programming works, (not any particular tool set per se. but more the foundation necessary to learn one) is becoming the equivalent of reading and writing. 300 years ago, you could easily perform most jobs without these skills, but recently they became absolutely necessary. The point is that "living a life" is a dynamic notion, and that perhaps in the future, programming skills would become requisite knowledge.
philwelch 17y ago
"If you want to get your word out and communicate, you can do that as long as you can type. Having someone to fix your computer for you so that you can blog isn't illiteracy, nor learning to sign up to Gmail isn't comparable to learning to read and write." Likewise, you could have very good ideas to share with the world, and it shouldn't be impediment to have to dictate all of them to a scribe.

by yason 17y ago

drkevorkian 17y ago

The argument goes that understanding how programming works, (not any particular tool set per se. but more the foundation necessary to learn one) is becoming the equivalent of reading and writing. 300 years ago, you could easily perform most jobs without these skills, but recently they became absolutely necessary. The point is that "living a life" is a dynamic notion, and that perhaps in the future, programming skills would become requisite knowledge.

philwelch 17y ago

"If you want to get your word out and communicate, you can do that as long as you can type. Having someone to fix your computer for you so that you can blog isn't illiteracy, nor learning to sign up to Gmail isn't comparable to learning to read and write." Likewise, you could have very good ideas to share with the world, and it shouldn't be impediment to have to dictate all of them to a scribe.