6 ms·

This heavily filters for people who have had experience with programming in high-school or even before that, there's no way for a programming novice to pass tha

This heavily filters for people who have had experience with programming in high-school or even before that, there's no way for a programming novice to pass that grueling routine. And then people rhetorically ask themselves why students coming from economically disadvantaged households are under-represented in this industry (one of the best paying industries in this time and age). Stuff like that has got to change.

young_unixer 6y ago
I don't really get the correlation between household income and programming experience in high school. Their parents can't afford a laptop? They can't afford an Internet connection? The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? They don't have time? Is programming affected more than other subjects like math, English/grammar, science, etc?
- tedivm 6y ago
  This may be less so now than it was 10 years ago, but I absolutely promise you that having a decent computer (not great, not a gaming pc, but just something that a kid can feel comfortable experimenting with) that is readily available (and not being shared with siblings) is absolutely a luxury.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  > Their parents can't afford a laptop? They can't afford an Internet connection? The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? They don't have time? All of the above, and it's surprising this isn't obvious. It may be hard to notice or internalize if you've never seen it and only know privilege, but possession of all or even some of those things is not a guarantee for everyone. Believe it or not, there are some who don't come home to a computer, caring (or even existent!) parents, stable meals, or free time.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - young_unixer 6y ago
    It isn't obvious to me because I've never lived in the US. I was genuinely asking, not trying to shame people who can't afford a computer. Maybe I didn't use the right words to formulate my question.
    - lcuff 6y ago
      Thanks for clarifying the context of your question. Very helpful, and changes the tone completely. 1/2 of the people in the U.S. "don't pay taxes", that is, don't make enough money to owe taxes. So that's one issue. I mentor a hispanic kid who's mother's English was so weak and her knowledge of 'the system' so weak, that she couldn't take advantage of programs to provide used computers to her kids, or low-cost Internet access to her household. And the $10/month for low-cost Internet access WAS out of reach. 10 people in a two bedroom apartment was also their norm.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- joshuacc 6y ago
  > Their parents can't afford a laptop? Yes! There are millions of kids in the US whose parents can't afford a cheap $300 laptop. The federal government pays for school lunches because there are so many kids who otherwise wouldn't even be getting decent food otherwise. > They can't afford an Internet connection? See above. Also, there are many places in the US where getting broadband service is very difficult. Including places just an hour outside of Washington, DC. My parents were only able to get conventional broadband service a few years ago. Prior to that they paid exorbitant fees for satellite internet service with a 500mb per month cap. > The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? Imagine being a kid with 3 siblings and your parent(s) living in a studio apartment. Or a kid that doesn't have a stable "home" at all. > They don't have time? That can be an issue too, depending on age. A teenager may be working outside of school hours to help take care of the family's financial needs.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  "Is programming affected more than other subjects like math, English/grammar, science, etc?" Probably a bit more, as it is common to learn other subjects by a book, but learning programming without a computer ... sounds hard.
  - TheCycoONE 6y ago
    Dijkstra probably would disagree, but his isn't a common opinion.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  > I don't really get the correlation between household income and programming experience in high school. > Their parents can't afford a laptop? Holy crap, the amount of privilege shown off in just two sentences is absolutely astounding. This may come as a shock to you, but a very significant number of people don't have a couple hundred dollars to buy a low-end used laptop. 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 for an emergency expense [0], let alone save $400 for a laptop. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-cant-handle-a-400-unexpected-expense.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...
  - astrange 6y ago
    > 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 for an emergency expense [0], let alone save $400 for a laptop. It actually doesn't say that, it says they don't have $400 in cash equivalents but may be able to produce it by selling "assets". So a person who keeps all their savings in CDs or investments also counts, although only for expenses you can't put on credit cards.
    - illirik 6y ago
      The working poor simply don't have the safety net of good credit or wealthy families that the vast majority of HN commenters do. If you're living paycheck to paycheck and get a $400 surprise expense, you don't have $400 just sitting in some money market account, or two shares of SPY they can just sell, because the poverty wages being paid to millions of working people leave zero margin to build any sort of financial security, leading to a kind of precariousness that is unimaginable to the educated professional with a comfortable upbringing. "Assets" means things like a wedding ring, some power tools, a computer, or maybe even a 1995 Dodge Neon; if you go to a pawn shop, you can see the sorts of things people pawn (or sell) when they desperately need $400 for an emergency expense. They often take payday loans, mortgaging their next minimum-wage paycheck; since the next paycheck minus payment no longer covers their regular living expenses, they take another predatory loan or pawn another heirloom. 80% of people who take a payday loan have to renew it because they can't repay it. I have a deep personal dislike for Dave Ramsey, but he does a good job of explaining how even minor emergency expenses can lead to a cycle of debt and further despair. (https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/get-out-payday-loan-trap https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/get-out-payday-loan-trap) There is so much more instability and precarity in this country than most PMC people can imagine.
- icedchai 6y ago
  The cost of computers has come down a ton, but it was a much bigger deal in the 90's and earlier. A lot of people didn't have computers at home. A decent x86 system (like a 486 with VGA etc) was at least $2500 or so. That's without any programming tools... compilers weren't free. When I meet fellow developers who didn't have computers growing up, I realize how privileged and lucky I was.
- onei 6y ago
  In the UK, every student does Math, English and Science to a basic level. Maths and English in particular were held up as non-negotiable if you ever wanted a job, I suspect so you had a reasonable level of literacy and numeracy to be able to count money, read letters, etc. Conversely, programming was not available in my fairly middle-class school. In terms of money, we only have to look to the laptops schools are providing to students (or not depending on government funding) to see how many children don't have access to a laptop. A good place to learn can also be hard to find for large families in small houses which is sadly all too common for low income households.
- nwallin 6y ago
  74% of American families own a computer. The other 26% do not. Incomes are also highly clustered- chances are any given cohort of high school students either has 90% or more or 10% or less kids with computers, without a lot in between. Relatively poor districts may have a very general computer literacy class (typing, word processing, spreadsheets) but won't have a programming class, because the logistics of getting them adequate time at a computer to complete the work is impossible. https://www.statista.com/statistics/756054/united-states-adults-desktop-laptop-ownership/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/756054/united-states-adu...
ababaiem 6y ago
Having gone through the same experience, I can tell you that it isn't necessarily the case. More often than not, those who had some programming experience in some high-level language would often get discouraged with the difficulty and drop out. In the end, it was mostly those that didn't get discouraged and socialized with the other students that would remain in the end. I myself did not have any programming experience before going through that ordeal.
- dfox 6y ago
  My experience with C courses with this structure of automatically validated home works not only filter "the weak" but also people with previous (especially C on Unix) experience, because nobody with any kind of practical Unix experience will write code that will pass these kinds of rigorous C-standard conformance and memory leaks checks, because for practical applications doing all that is actually not only unnecessary bud also detrimental to runtime efficiency.
  - throwaway3neu94 6y ago
    I think a passing test suite, no diff after clang-format, clean valgrind and clang-analyze checks are not too much to ask for. As long as the requirements are documented and the system is transparent and allows resubmission. But I agree there is a risk of academic instructors going way overboard in practice, e.g. by flagging actually useful minor standard conformance violations (like zero length arrays or properly #ifdef'd code assuming bitfield order).
    - dfox 6y ago
      My aversion to such systems is primarily motivated by the fact that every one of such system somehow penalized resubmissions. I probably don't have anything against "you have to write program that is compiled by this gcc/llvm commandline without producing any diagnostics and then passes this intentionally partially documented test suite". But in most cases the first part ends up meaning something like "cc -Werror -std=c89 -ansi -strict" where the real definition of what that really means depends on what exactly the "cc" is and the teachers usually don't document that and don't even see why that is required (ie. you can probably produce some set of edge-case inputs to gcc to prove that gcc is or isn't valid implementation of some definition of C, but this conjecture does not work the other way around).
nanagojo 6y ago
> one of the best paying industries in this time and age Medicine is still better paid and better paid universally. Silicon valley is really the outlier here, most of Europe and the world programmers don't get paid that much in comparison.
- KptMarchewa 6y ago
  Software development is usually better paid in Poland than medicine. Medicine starts to pay good way later in life, and only in certain specialisations.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    And that's ultimately why we had the most surplus deaths in 2020 in EU.
- mjcohen 6y ago
  Medicine also requires, after college, medical school and a residency - typically 6 to 9 years work. Programming requires none of this.
  - th3sly 6y ago
    > Programming requires none of this. But it requires you to refresh your knowledge constantly so from this point of view it's similar
    - KptMarchewa 6y ago
      If you're arguing that medicine does not, then I hope you're doing software engineering.
      - harpiaharpyja 6y ago
        > so from this point of view it's similar
  - 6y ago
__turbobrew__ 6y ago
I went through a very similar gauntlet in my first undergrad computers class. I didn’t know anything about programming or linux, but it was fine. I think the filter is more effective for finding those who can quickly adapt, learn, and grok a methodical mindset. Not necessary characteristics to be a programmer, but necessary characteristics to excel at programming.
- throwaway3neu94 6y ago
  Does it though, or is it more survivorship bias and maybe lucking into finding someone who will spend hours mentoring you? I've mentored quite a few first semester students (in my spare time, to help. Not as a job) and there is no way some of them would've passed without serious help. At some point I used to think privately that CS should have a programming test as an admission exam, because these students did drag everyone down. If medicine and law have admission restrictions, why not CS too? But I have changed my opinion because I think everyone deserves a real opportunity, and our school system does not provide a level playing field sadly. (Also the medicine & law admission criteria are GPA based and that is the last thing I'd want for CS.) Anyway the real filter was always maths.
cynoclast 6y ago
My professor (head of CS dept) referred to these as 'weed out classes'. If that sounds evil, imagine the grief, wasted money, time, frustration, and stress of letting people get 3-4 years into computer science and then dropping out because it's fucking hard. So my second hardest classes were freshman year. 3rd year (micro-architecture and assembler)finally bested them.
Jach 6y ago
You shouldn't underestimate the novice. The professors who do such weeder classes will have the data though, so you don't have to believe anyone's experiences if you can instead ask a professor... For what it's worth though I'll add to the sibling comments and state in my experience too prior programming experience is less correlative than you seem to think. (I had it, though I quickly found out after my first week "I thought I knew C, I do not know C.") Those who have been subjected to such programs can also probably agree that the filtering of the first semester (and there is a filter, but again we think it's a fair one not dependent on prior programming experience or other such privilege) ends up normalizing everyone, for the benefit of everyone. For the people who started at 0, they're now Somewhere nearby everyone else, ready for the next (harder) material, and for people who started with some "advantages" they've discovered they... are also now Somewhere, not Somewhere Else ahead of everyone like they might have been at the very start. In these sorts of programs, people with prior experience find that they couldn't sleep through their classes and get A's like they might have pulled off in high school, their advantages were not actually that significant after all, and indeed some from-nothings can and do perform better than they. For anyone who just wants access to the software industry's wealth, I'd encourage them to ignore college entirely. There may be a case-by-case basis to consider college, especially if you need economic relief now in the form of scholarships/grants/loans only accessible through the traditional college protocol, but in general, avoid. (If you want something besides just access to the wealth, you have more considerations to make.)
enriquto 6y ago
I don't understand your concern. How is teaching programming in school discriminatory? Would it be better to not teach programming at all?
- ajuc 6y ago
  Depends how you teach it. Imagine teachers at primary schools started teaching English by analyzing Shakespeare. Or imagine math was taught by giving kids all the axioms and requiring them to derive the other rules needed to solve tasks as needed :) Kids from well off families would be ok - it would just be considered another random thing you have to teach your kids to help them make it. But other kids would suffer and think "English and math is not for me".
  - enriquto 6y ago
    I understand what you mean. This has nothing to do with programming, it's a general (and difficult!) concern regarding everything that is taught at schools. By that same argument, schools should not teach anything that is not widely known by 100% of the parents of each kid. Otherwise, it would be discrimination to those kids whose parents cannot help. I disagree very strongly with this principle. I have two kids, and the best things that they learn in school are precisely those that I'm unable to teach them. For a start: mastery of the language, since I'm not a native speaker of the place where we live. I would be frankly enraged if the school lowered the level of language exigence to accommodate for the needs of my kids who do not speak it at home!
    - ajuc 6y ago
      > By that same argument, schools should not teach anything that is not widely known by 100% of the parents of each kid. Otherwise, it would be discrimination to those kids whose parents cannot help. I disagree very strongly with this principle. Not at all what I mean. I mean schools (at least primary schools) should be designed for top 80% or 90% not for top 10% or 20%. You can never get to 100% but resigning from the start and going for 20% makes no sense. You should expect people taking math at university to be able to solve linear equations and explaining it is a waste of time but you shouldn't expect kids in primary school to be able to do the same and it is your responsibility to prepare them in case they want to pursue academic career. If public schools teach linear equations it's ok to assume that knowledge at university. If they don't - it's not. It should be the same with teaching programming and anything else is just funding rich people kids education by everybody's taxes. The whole point of common public low-level education is to maximize the number of people participating in the economy. It's much better if everybody can read and write. Whole industries are impossible without this. And so is democracy. It's the same with basic programming and math literacy. It benefits the whole society if vast majority of people have it. If you "weed out" 60% or 80% of population just because they happen to be born in the wrong environment or went to the wrong school - you lose massive amounts of money and economic/scientific potential. Then you have to import these people from countries which don't fuck their own citizens in such a way.

young_unixer 6y ago

I don't really get the correlation between household income and programming experience in high school. Their parents can't afford a laptop? They can't afford an Internet connection? The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? They don't have time? Is programming affected more than other subjects like math, English/grammar, science, etc?

tedivm 6y ago
This may be less so now than it was 10 years ago, but I absolutely promise you that having a decent computer (not great, not a gaming pc, but just something that a kid can feel comfortable experimenting with) that is readily available (and not being shared with siblings) is absolutely a luxury.
_underfl0w_ 6y ago
> Their parents can't afford a laptop? They can't afford an Internet connection? The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? They don't have time? All of the above, and it's surprising this isn't obvious. It may be hard to notice or internalize if you've never seen it and only know privilege, but possession of all or even some of those things is not a guarantee for everyone. Believe it or not, there are some who don't come home to a computer, caring (or even existent!) parents, stable meals, or free time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- young_unixer 6y ago
  It isn't obvious to me because I've never lived in the US. I was genuinely asking, not trying to shame people who can't afford a computer. Maybe I didn't use the right words to formulate my question.
  - lcuff 6y ago
    Thanks for clarifying the context of your question. Very helpful, and changes the tone completely. 1/2 of the people in the U.S. "don't pay taxes", that is, don't make enough money to owe taxes. So that's one issue. I mentor a hispanic kid who's mother's English was so weak and her knowledge of 'the system' so weak, that she couldn't take advantage of programs to provide used computers to her kids, or low-cost Internet access to her household. And the $10/month for low-cost Internet access WAS out of reach. 10 people in a two bedroom apartment was also their norm.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
joshuacc 6y ago
> Their parents can't afford a laptop? Yes! There are millions of kids in the US whose parents can't afford a cheap $300 laptop. The federal government pays for school lunches because there are so many kids who otherwise wouldn't even be getting decent food otherwise. > They can't afford an Internet connection? See above. Also, there are many places in the US where getting broadband service is very difficult. Including places just an hour outside of Washington, DC. My parents were only able to get conventional broadband service a few years ago. Prior to that they paid exorbitant fees for satellite internet service with a 500mb per month cap. > The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? Imagine being a kid with 3 siblings and your parent(s) living in a studio apartment. Or a kid that doesn't have a stable "home" at all. > They don't have time? That can be an issue too, depending on age. A teenager may be working outside of school hours to help take care of the family's financial needs.
hutzlibu 6y ago
"Is programming affected more than other subjects like math, English/grammar, science, etc?" Probably a bit more, as it is common to learn other subjects by a book, but learning programming without a computer ... sounds hard.
- TheCycoONE 6y ago
  Dijkstra probably would disagree, but his isn't a common opinion.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
> I don't really get the correlation between household income and programming experience in high school. > Their parents can't afford a laptop? Holy crap, the amount of privilege shown off in just two sentences is absolutely astounding. This may come as a shock to you, but a very significant number of people don't have a couple hundred dollars to buy a low-end used laptop. 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 for an emergency expense [0], let alone save $400 for a laptop. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-cant-handle-a-400-unexpected-expense.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...
- astrange 6y ago
  > 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 for an emergency expense [0], let alone save $400 for a laptop. It actually doesn't say that, it says they don't have $400 in cash equivalents but may be able to produce it by selling "assets". So a person who keeps all their savings in CDs or investments also counts, although only for expenses you can't put on credit cards.
  - illirik 6y ago
    The working poor simply don't have the safety net of good credit or wealthy families that the vast majority of HN commenters do. If you're living paycheck to paycheck and get a $400 surprise expense, you don't have $400 just sitting in some money market account, or two shares of SPY they can just sell, because the poverty wages being paid to millions of working people leave zero margin to build any sort of financial security, leading to a kind of precariousness that is unimaginable to the educated professional with a comfortable upbringing. "Assets" means things like a wedding ring, some power tools, a computer, or maybe even a 1995 Dodge Neon; if you go to a pawn shop, you can see the sorts of things people pawn (or sell) when they desperately need $400 for an emergency expense. They often take payday loans, mortgaging their next minimum-wage paycheck; since the next paycheck minus payment no longer covers their regular living expenses, they take another predatory loan or pawn another heirloom. 80% of people who take a payday loan have to renew it because they can't repay it. I have a deep personal dislike for Dave Ramsey, but he does a good job of explaining how even minor emergency expenses can lead to a cycle of debt and further despair. (https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/get-out-payday-loan-trap https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/get-out-payday-loan-trap) There is so much more instability and precarity in this country than most PMC people can imagine.
icedchai 6y ago
The cost of computers has come down a ton, but it was a much bigger deal in the 90's and earlier. A lot of people didn't have computers at home. A decent x86 system (like a 486 with VGA etc) was at least $2500 or so. That's without any programming tools... compilers weren't free. When I meet fellow developers who didn't have computers growing up, I realize how privileged and lucky I was.
onei 6y ago
In the UK, every student does Math, English and Science to a basic level. Maths and English in particular were held up as non-negotiable if you ever wanted a job, I suspect so you had a reasonable level of literacy and numeracy to be able to count money, read letters, etc. Conversely, programming was not available in my fairly middle-class school. In terms of money, we only have to look to the laptops schools are providing to students (or not depending on government funding) to see how many children don't have access to a laptop. A good place to learn can also be hard to find for large families in small houses which is sadly all too common for low income households.
nwallin 6y ago
74% of American families own a computer. The other 26% do not. Incomes are also highly clustered- chances are any given cohort of high school students either has 90% or more or 10% or less kids with computers, without a lot in between. Relatively poor districts may have a very general computer literacy class (typing, word processing, spreadsheets) but won't have a programming class, because the logistics of getting them adequate time at a computer to complete the work is impossible. https://www.statista.com/statistics/756054/united-states-adults-desktop-laptop-ownership/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/756054/united-states-adu...

ababaiem 6y ago

Having gone through the same experience, I can tell you that it isn't necessarily the case. More often than not, those who had some programming experience in some high-level language would often get discouraged with the difficulty and drop out. In the end, it was mostly those that didn't get discouraged and socialized with the other students that would remain in the end. I myself did not have any programming experience before going through that ordeal.

dfox 6y ago
My experience with C courses with this structure of automatically validated home works not only filter "the weak" but also people with previous (especially C on Unix) experience, because nobody with any kind of practical Unix experience will write code that will pass these kinds of rigorous C-standard conformance and memory leaks checks, because for practical applications doing all that is actually not only unnecessary bud also detrimental to runtime efficiency.
- throwaway3neu94 6y ago
  I think a passing test suite, no diff after clang-format, clean valgrind and clang-analyze checks are not too much to ask for. As long as the requirements are documented and the system is transparent and allows resubmission. But I agree there is a risk of academic instructors going way overboard in practice, e.g. by flagging actually useful minor standard conformance violations (like zero length arrays or properly #ifdef'd code assuming bitfield order).
  - dfox 6y ago
    My aversion to such systems is primarily motivated by the fact that every one of such system somehow penalized resubmissions. I probably don't have anything against "you have to write program that is compiled by this gcc/llvm commandline without producing any diagnostics and then passes this intentionally partially documented test suite". But in most cases the first part ends up meaning something like "cc -Werror -std=c89 -ansi -strict" where the real definition of what that really means depends on what exactly the "cc" is and the teachers usually don't document that and don't even see why that is required (ie. you can probably produce some set of edge-case inputs to gcc to prove that gcc is or isn't valid implementation of some definition of C, but this conjecture does not work the other way around).

nanagojo 6y ago

> one of the best paying industries in this time and age Medicine is still better paid and better paid universally. Silicon valley is really the outlier here, most of Europe and the world programmers don't get paid that much in comparison.

KptMarchewa 6y ago
Software development is usually better paid in Poland than medicine. Medicine starts to pay good way later in life, and only in certain specialisations.
- ajuc 6y ago
  And that's ultimately why we had the most surplus deaths in 2020 in EU.
mjcohen 6y ago
Medicine also requires, after college, medical school and a residency - typically 6 to 9 years work. Programming requires none of this.
- th3sly 6y ago
  > Programming requires none of this. But it requires you to refresh your knowledge constantly so from this point of view it's similar
  - KptMarchewa 6y ago
    If you're arguing that medicine does not, then I hope you're doing software engineering.
    - harpiaharpyja 6y ago
      > so from this point of view it's similar
- 6y ago

__turbobrew__ 6y ago

I went through a very similar gauntlet in my first undergrad computers class. I didn’t know anything about programming or linux, but it was fine. I think the filter is more effective for finding those who can quickly adapt, learn, and grok a methodical mindset. Not necessary characteristics to be a programmer, but necessary characteristics to excel at programming.

throwaway3neu94 6y ago
Does it though, or is it more survivorship bias and maybe lucking into finding someone who will spend hours mentoring you? I've mentored quite a few first semester students (in my spare time, to help. Not as a job) and there is no way some of them would've passed without serious help. At some point I used to think privately that CS should have a programming test as an admission exam, because these students did drag everyone down. If medicine and law have admission restrictions, why not CS too? But I have changed my opinion because I think everyone deserves a real opportunity, and our school system does not provide a level playing field sadly. (Also the medicine & law admission criteria are GPA based and that is the last thing I'd want for CS.) Anyway the real filter was always maths.

cynoclast 6y ago

My professor (head of CS dept) referred to these as 'weed out classes'. If that sounds evil, imagine the grief, wasted money, time, frustration, and stress of letting people get 3-4 years into computer science and then dropping out because it's fucking hard. So my second hardest classes were freshman year. 3rd year (micro-architecture and assembler)finally bested them.

Jach 6y ago

You shouldn't underestimate the novice. The professors who do such weeder classes will have the data though, so you don't have to believe anyone's experiences if you can instead ask a professor... For what it's worth though I'll add to the sibling comments and state in my experience too prior programming experience is less correlative than you seem to think. (I had it, though I quickly found out after my first week "I thought I knew C, I do not know C.") Those who have been subjected to such programs can also probably agree that the filtering of the first semester (and there is a filter, but again we think it's a fair one not dependent on prior programming experience or other such privilege) ends up normalizing everyone, for the benefit of everyone. For the people who started at 0, they're now Somewhere nearby everyone else, ready for the next (harder) material, and for people who started with some "advantages" they've discovered they... are also now Somewhere, not Somewhere Else ahead of everyone like they might have been at the very start. In these sorts of programs, people with prior experience find that they couldn't sleep through their classes and get A's like they might have pulled off in high school, their advantages were not actually that significant after all, and indeed some from-nothings can and do perform better than they. For anyone who just wants access to the software industry's wealth, I'd encourage them to ignore college entirely. There may be a case-by-case basis to consider college, especially if you need economic relief now in the form of scholarships/grants/loans only accessible through the traditional college protocol, but in general, avoid. (If you want something besides just access to the wealth, you have more considerations to make.)

enriquto 6y ago

I don't understand your concern. How is teaching programming in school discriminatory? Would it be better to not teach programming at all?

ajuc 6y ago
Depends how you teach it. Imagine teachers at primary schools started teaching English by analyzing Shakespeare. Or imagine math was taught by giving kids all the axioms and requiring them to derive the other rules needed to solve tasks as needed :) Kids from well off families would be ok - it would just be considered another random thing you have to teach your kids to help them make it. But other kids would suffer and think "English and math is not for me".
- enriquto 6y ago
  I understand what you mean. This has nothing to do with programming, it's a general (and difficult!) concern regarding everything that is taught at schools. By that same argument, schools should not teach anything that is not widely known by 100% of the parents of each kid. Otherwise, it would be discrimination to those kids whose parents cannot help. I disagree very strongly with this principle. I have two kids, and the best things that they learn in school are precisely those that I'm unable to teach them. For a start: mastery of the language, since I'm not a native speaker of the place where we live. I would be frankly enraged if the school lowered the level of language exigence to accommodate for the needs of my kids who do not speak it at home!
  - ajuc 6y ago
    > By that same argument, schools should not teach anything that is not widely known by 100% of the parents of each kid. Otherwise, it would be discrimination to those kids whose parents cannot help. I disagree very strongly with this principle. Not at all what I mean. I mean schools (at least primary schools) should be designed for top 80% or 90% not for top 10% or 20%. You can never get to 100% but resigning from the start and going for 20% makes no sense. You should expect people taking math at university to be able to solve linear equations and explaining it is a waste of time but you shouldn't expect kids in primary school to be able to do the same and it is your responsibility to prepare them in case they want to pursue academic career. If public schools teach linear equations it's ok to assume that knowledge at university. If they don't - it's not. It should be the same with teaching programming and anything else is just funding rich people kids education by everybody's taxes. The whole point of common public low-level education is to maximize the number of people participating in the economy. It's much better if everybody can read and write. Whole industries are impossible without this. And so is democracy. It's the same with basic programming and math literacy. It benefits the whole society if vast majority of people have it. If you "weed out" 60% or 80% of population just because they happen to be born in the wrong environment or went to the wrong school - you lose massive amounts of money and economic/scientific potential. Then you have to import these people from countries which don't fuck their own citizens in such a way.