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> Just as knowing why apples fall down and aeroplanes fly up, the citizens of the 21st century need to know that computers are not magical boxes but composed

• Waterluvian 10y ago
  One of the most common challenges that I see engineers face is to effectively empathize with the user. When you know a lot about something, you just see it in a fundamentally different way. This makes it difficult to focus on making it easy for the user to do what they want, not what you think they should want. When I drive my car, I just want to get from point A to point B while listening to a podcast. I don't care to know how they work. This doesn't make me enfeebled or ignorant, I would just rather commit my learning cycles elsewhere. Computers need to be the same. Why would we be so foolish as to think that it's a wrongdoing that people are able to effectively use computers without having any clue about how they function? Literacy isn't about forcing people to learn things, it's about ensuring that everyone has the baseline exposure to help them discover if they have an interest in a topic, and then the resources to explore that topic if they choose.
  • vetinari 10y ago
    The problem with computers (abstracting from accidental complexity) is, that they do what you tell them to do, not what you think you told them to do. You cannot somehow make an agreement or solve it, how it is solved with humans - by communicating. You must formulate your thought exactly. And that's what most people have a problem with - except for some hard sciences, they never needed to formulate their thought that way.
    • CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
      Not to be rude, but how often do you interact with other human beings? Communication is a huge problem in everyday life. Anyone who has ever had even a short term SO (longer than a one night stand/few dates) has learned that it is important to be careful in how you phrase things and to understand that people may not understand what you were trying to say.
      • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        You can engage in a dialog with humans. "What? Hey! Don't get mad! Let me explain!" Instead of just deleting all your files without recourse.
        • CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
          Again, I don't want to be rude, but have you been in a relationship? Recovering from a foot in the mouth can be a lot harder than hoping you actually have a back-up somewhere. Also, that is kind of a worst case scenario and is pretty hard to pull off these days (most OSes are smart enough to prevent rm -rf * from doing much more than ruining your afternoon).
      • sctb 10y ago
        But it is rude. An important part of a civil and substantive discussion is not personally insulting other users. Please don't do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • tdkl 10y ago
    > Literacy isn't about forcing people to learn things, it's about ensuring that everyone has the baseline exposure to help them discover if they have an interest in a topic, and then the resources to explore that topic if they choose. That sounds hilariously naive. If we'd let people decide themselves what they want to learn the majority would still be in the sandbox making castles and playing with toys all day.
    • davegardner 10y ago
      That may be true for children, but surely adults who have obtained a basic level of education should be able to decide for themselves. Of course the question this leads to is "what is thr basic level of understanding that people should have in any given topic"?
    • dkersten 10y ago
      Its about exposure, not learning enough to be a professional. For example, I learned some basic mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography, etc in school. Until I got to university, what I learned wasn't enough to make me a mathematician, physicist, chemist etc. It did give me a baseline on which I could build and it gave me exposure. This exposure was forced on me, but what I did with it (a computer science degree and a programming career), was something that was left up to me to choose later. I see computers/software the same way. Its common enough in day to day lives now that I think a baseline of computer literacy and some basic exposure should be required and afterwards the students can choose if they wish to explore more or not. The exposure doesn't necessarily have to prep them for real work (I'm pretty sure dissecting a frog isn't going to prepare me for veterinary work...), just give them a taste of how things work.
  • marcosdumay 10y ago
    > When I drive my car, I just want to get from point A to point B while listening to a podcast. I don't care to know how they work. Yet, you've spent months explicitly training for that task.
    • dreta 10y ago
      And that’s just learning how to use the car. We’re talking about building one.
      • panic 10y ago
        I think the car analogy kind of falls apart at this point. Using a computer and writing programs for a computer are both interacting with software. Take spreadsheets, for example: is making a spreadsheet analogous to building a car or to driving one? What about drag-and-drop visual programming?
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    • CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
      And people have spent years learning how to check facebook. The problem with this pitch is that it doesn't understand the distinction. By a lot of people's standards, I am a scientist (just not a domain scientist). I spend my life understanding how things work and figuring out ways to further our understanding of those. It is great. If you ask me about how a computer works, I can talk for hours. Physical phenomena? Minutes. Biology? I can make a crude joke As for a car? I vaguely understand the principles of a combustion engine, but I couldn't for the life of me make one. My understanding is "You get gas into the engine. You light it with a spark plug. It bursts into flames which moves a piston which moves a crank which moves a bunch of gears and eventually moves wheels". I don't know anything beyond that Hell, another good example is in the realm of video games. Kerbal Space Program is awesome and does a great job of making people remember why they learned physics. But engines are a black box for the vast majority of us and you genuinely don't need to understand how the fuel gets to the thruster or what happens. It is just a black box where fuel goes in one end and fire comes out the other, with fire generating delta V. And same here. Most people don't need to know WHY an apple falls. They just have to know that stuff will fall. Whereas the physicists and funky table makers DO have to understand why the apple falls and how it can be stopped.
  • caseysoftware 10y ago
    Good point. Remember, one of the key aspects of OO is hiding implementation details because they shouldn't matter. This fascination with exposing them and forcing them on end users is absurd. We have to accept that some tasks and jobs are not for everyone and that's okay. That could be due to aptitude, skill gaps, education gaps, interest, or dozens of other things, some due to education system, some due to abilities of the individual.. and that's still okay.
  • rtens 10y ago
    In the (proximate) words of Alan Kay: "Giving people what they want is marketing, given them what they need is education." I'm more interested in the latter. But I do very much agree that using a computer should not require any idea about how they function. But that's for using a computer like a tool. For me, computers are not mere tools but a medium. So what you wanna do is to express yourself with computers. And for that you need to know how to do it.
• _pmf_ 10y ago
  > In all honesty, I don't know why apples fall down and aeroplanes fly up. The problems usually only start when it's the other way around.
• rtens 10y ago
  That's unfortunate since I put a lot of work in these paragraphs. I'd love to know what you think would make a better case for improving software literacy.
  • gmluke 10y ago
    > Software is fundamentally broken. It's limited, never quite works the way we want it to, but it can't be changed, can't be combined and can't be trusted. In general, this level of hyperbole puts me off. Besides anything else, this sentence is outright false, since much software can be changed, combined, and trusted. I know it's a manifesto, but still, this kind of rhetoric is unlikely to persuade people who don't already agree with you. The issues you are discussing in this manifesto are not new, and many people have attempted to create tools to tackle those things before. Perhaps try to clarify why you think those tools fall short, in order to persuade people that zells is useful.
    • rtens 10y ago
      Sorry that the style puts you off. I wanted to make a strong statement that people either strongly agree or disagree with or maybe find ridicoulous. But if it helps me finding peopoe who already agree with me I'd say mission accomplished. The rothers I'll try to persuade with the implementation of those ideas. I started to creat a comparison of other platforms. Let me know what platforms you think are missing or where I am misjudging some. https://cdn.rawgit.com/zells/core/master/comparison.html https://cdn.rawgit.com/zells/core/master/comparison.html