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Literacy is the ability to read and write regardless of the domain (science, history, poetry, religion, software, whatever). Software is, ultimately, a set of

Literacy is the ability to read and write regardless of the domain (science, history, poetry, religion, software, whatever). Software is, ultimately, a set of logical instructions. Other people who understand those instructions are literate in that domain. You seem to be taking a single application of literacy (software) to be the entire scope of literacy writ large. It isn't clear to me why you think that, especially when no programming language is capable of "encoding" the range of human thought that, say, English is. Please respond in the programming language of your choice.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago
You seem to be saying that software is one "silo" of literacy, like the jargon one needs to understand film criticism or the politics of the hundred years' war. I don't think that's fair. Software if anything is a means of modelling and transmission of that model - being able to create and manipulate models is what we try to do with language and written word - but the compiler we are targeting is on other people's heads. so it's a bit hit and miss - we spend a lot of effort making us all share the same compilers, from schools to legal judgements. but with software the compiler is simpler and so the models can be more transparent and that Inthinknis the big difference. No I cannot express my model in english as well as I can in any program- I am not trying to express the whole range of human thought in software - but what we can do is and will be so valuable I can only compare it to the shift in value we got from mass literacy
- ARandomerDude 7y ago
  Not jargon. The ability to read/write code is a knowledge domain. Literacy allows communication about all sorts of knowledge domains (software being one). But knowledge of the software world does not (dis)qualify one for business leadership, or to be a heart surgeon, or a janitor, or any number of fields. Your original post implied that knowledge of software, the "new literacy" is a prerequisite for any moderately advanced task, which is nonsense.
  - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
    I think your point is that software is like "engineering" "Biology" or "house building" - one siloed skill amoung many that some people will specialise in I disagree - I think software is more horizontal - it allows great improvement of any form of knowledge work, and is much more comparable to "learning to read" (or perhaps sits somewhere in a hierarchy of horizontal skills between "reading" and "statistics")

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

You seem to be saying that software is one "silo" of literacy, like the jargon one needs to understand film criticism or the politics of the hundred years' war. I don't think that's fair. Software if anything is a means of modelling and transmission of that model - being able to create and manipulate models is what we try to do with language and written word - but the compiler we are targeting is on other people's heads. so it's a bit hit and miss - we spend a lot of effort making us all share the same compilers, from schools to legal judgements. but with software the compiler is simpler and so the models can be more transparent and that Inthinknis the big difference. No I cannot express my model in english as well as I can in any program- I am not trying to express the whole range of human thought in software - but what we can do is and will be so valuable I can only compare it to the shift in value we got from mass literacy

ARandomerDude 7y ago
Not jargon. The ability to read/write code is a knowledge domain. Literacy allows communication about all sorts of knowledge domains (software being one). But knowledge of the software world does not (dis)qualify one for business leadership, or to be a heart surgeon, or a janitor, or any number of fields. Your original post implied that knowledge of software, the "new literacy" is a prerequisite for any moderately advanced task, which is nonsense.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  I think your point is that software is like "engineering" "Biology" or "house building" - one siloed skill amoung many that some people will specialise in I disagree - I think software is more horizontal - it allows great improvement of any form of knowledge work, and is much more comparable to "learning to read" (or perhaps sits somewhere in a hierarchy of horizontal skills between "reading" and "statistics")