Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence Alan Kay made t

Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence Alan Kay made the same point in a interview with ACM: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523. He, much more eloquently, said: Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture. Fixing this is a much bigger issue. It in fact encompasses a lot of other areas, and they are no closer to solving it than computer science is (which was humorously cited to be a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia). Edit: As a side note, Eric Ries recently said on a Lean Startup talk we live in an era where ignorance is truely optional http://bit.ly/9v0XI6 http://bit.ly/9v0XI6 . The problem is that most people opt in.