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I am going to bang on about this again, but imo software is a new form of literacy. Literacy of employees and customers transform(s/ed) all industries but we d

I am going to bang on about this again, but imo software is a new form of literacy. Literacy of employees and customers transform(s/ed) all industries but we don't talk about the literacy department or literacy investments in corporations. (It's what annoys me about low-code solutions - it's like trying to write your novel by linking pre-drawn cartoon squares together in innovative ways.) You cannot compensate for lack of literacy in a company or society. Same for software. In short some companies and some societies will be software literate and have time to focus on the next problems as ben talks about here - while others are stuck in the transition period. But they must go through the transition period - having good answers to "publisher questions" won't help if you don't have good answers to API questions Software skills will remain a wage distinction for some time

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> software is a new form of literacy Do you mean basic skills in using a desktop computer, or do you mean software engineering skills? > we don't talk about the literacy department Software development is a skilled craft, and will remain so.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Reading itself used to be considered a skilled craft. Only 4% of people knew how to read during the middle ages. Mostly clergy and civil servants. The grandparent poster is right imo. If programming becomes just another thing everyone knows, and takes a software class every year like they take an English class, the world will be way better off.
  - colinb 6y ago
    Interesting idea. Will everyone spend the next twenty years complaining about how much they hated Mrs Jones the programming teacher and how Stroustrup ruined programming for them? Put it another way. The reason we interview people the way that we do, is because it isn't realistic (unfortunately) to expect that a CS grad can fizz-buzz, or delete from a linked list, or whatever. Anyone who has spent a little time interviewing can confirm this. Why should we expect that secondary education would do a better job?
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      If they were taught this kind of thing from an extremely young age in school every year these interviews would be trivial, Just like speaking your native language is trivial.
      - dasudasu 6y ago
        We don't quite reach a very high degree of practical math literacy even though everyone is taught from a young age. Calculus considered as "incredibly difficult" being an example.
        fakedang 6y ago
        I know a lot of students who would not understand the idea behind calculus concepts, even though they knew the formulae. They simply could not grasp a very simple thing like "area under the curve" or "Slope of a curve". This was at a large private school with a selective admissions process. I know for a fact that my college educated parents (50+) would not know how to solve a calculus problem. So yeah, Calculus is a pretty bad example because it IS incredibly difficult for the general population.
        nickthemagicman 6y ago
        I don't know if this is like a smarts thing or just a poor math education thing.
        6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
        As someone who does math for a living, I’m always frustrated because I truly believe it’s a poor math education thing. But then people just respond, “oh MYNAME, you just think that because you’re good at it/you’re a math person.” As if that made the point less valid rather than more valid.
        nickthemagicman 6y ago
        I completely agree with you. I think it's a failure of the school system from a very early age because math is heavily dependent on foundations of previous classes. And I think it's more than just sharing the information we have to also make rational thinking fields as fun and cool as the emotional expression fields of study like English or Music and not the domain of 'nerds'. I think our whole culture would be way better off if people had better critical thinking logic and math skills.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    The important difference between programming and reading/writing is that written language is just another representation of natural language. All the complexity is in understanding and using natural language. Reading itself is trivial once you have some practice. Programming on the other hand is creating new abstractions (i.e modelling). It never becomes trivial, because it's not just a new encoding of existing abstractions. I think programming is no different than maths. Yes, everyone will have to know a little bit of it, but very few will be capable of modelling complex problems or implementing large software systems.
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      Language is just a tool to express a collection of ideas. The reason programming is not an extension of our natural language is because we haven't included those concepts in our natural language yet. The world would be way better off if everyone had better logic and analytical thinking ability
    - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
      By saying " ed few can do the hard stuff", is that not redefining use of maths to an arbitrary cutoff line. Think of all the instances of maths used globally. Do the millions of people who more or less get the idea of an average - this is used across politics, and common discourse. Does that count as maths? I would say yes, just as a for loop is programming. No we are not expecting a compiler but just "arranging the world so it can be easily iterated over" is a fine common objective.
      - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
        >Does that count as maths? Yes, that's exactly what I meant when I said "a little bit of it".
    - jart 6y ago
      Well lots of people can read and write, but few people are able to write a good novel. Everyone I know who isn't necessarily a software engineer but has basic programming skills has benefited from that knowledge. For example with everyday office work there's a big difference between someone who's able to use Word and someone who's able to use Access. The latter requires programming know-how. Also shell scripts and automation. It has a huge productivity amplifying impact.
  - maxwell 6y ago
    Agreed. Widespread ability to read and write natural language seems to've, eventually, made written constitutions not so-much "viable" but "necessary". It's easy to forget how innovative the U.S. Constitution was for being written, content aside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions Definitely excited about the social implications of widespread ability to read and write executable language in the long run, note when France crossed 50% literacy though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiteracy_france.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiterac...
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    I think I am the grandparent - and yes I agree, software is going to be table stakes for the next generation of corporate players (and by implication, those corporates who cannot will mean a huge gap opening up). It's not just "can my employees write a for loop" but it's "do we store data sensibly, when upper management wants a report is there a data history stretching back to the raw (ie no manual involvement). Do we all publish APIs and work through those defined interfaces - and many more.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  Software development is a skilled craft, and will remain so. Yes, you're right, but i would take the meaning that understanding Software development and deployment and how that can be leveraged is a literacy. There's tons of IT transformation disasters because the companies upping their literacy get stuck with knowing the words (SOA and Agile) but don't know how to make coherent use of them. Most projects these days are IT projects. Think about it like a dev, Software on a computer is useful. Networked software is more useful. Cloud and IaaS is really useful, SaaS is a really really useful and knowing when to use each to actually get stuff done is the most useful of all.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    >"Software on a computer is useful. Networked software is more useful. Cloud and IaaS is really useful, SaaS is a really really useful" I actually prefer the reverse progression as the closer it is to my computer / my server the less I spend on feeding somebody else's insatiable appetites. Being connected is one thing. Giving somebody else more and more control over your business is totally different.
- junon 6y ago
  Man it really sucks this is being down voted. Software engineering is not like reading. Reading conveys information about reality. Software code conveys solutions to problems. The latter requires understanding of computers, problem solving, domains, etc. Just like I can't pick up a book about organic chemistry and understand it, people are not going to some day care to know about how distributed systems algorithms work. It is indeed a skilled craft and this weird, cyberpunk-ian idea that everyone will just converge on technical literacy is very hand wavey and ignores simple facts like some people just not having ANY interest in computers or tech.
  - jfim 6y ago
    Literacy is actually a good analogy. People have different reading abilities, but they're all under the umbrella of literacy. Some people are illiterate, some people can read simple documents but struggle with higher complexity texts and contracts, and some people can breeze through high complexity texts. In the same way, some people struggle with computers, some are able to understand Excel spreadsheets, some are able to understand business logic expressed in a domain specific language, and some are able to read complex programs.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  I use the motor vehicle metaphor: Software literacy is equivalent to: being able to drive a car, fuel it, decode the various dashboard lights when they blink, maybe change a tire and check the oil. Software engineering is: Being a car mechanic. So is it very useful to society if the vast majority of adults are able to drive. It is not important or worth the effort to have a majority of adults as fully trained car mechanics. Although it is good to have "on ramps" for those with the aptitude and inclination to pick it up, as a useful and paying job. It is _now_ useful to society if the vast majority of adults are able to use a maps app, a messaging app, a word processor, maybe a formula in spreadsheet, calendar a zoom call and unmute themselves, have email and can distinguish a phishing email from real bank communications, ignore fake news on social media, etc. The difference between a formula in a spreadsheet and full-time coding is one of degree, not kind; but you could say the same about changing a tire vs. a full vehicle overhaul.
  - datavirtue 6y ago
    I used to be a mechanic and the analogy fits. Rich people drive into the shop and bark at you to "just fix it." They don't care about any of the minutia but it had better work they way they envision it working. Then they throw you a few pennies and drive off.
    - gpanders 6y ago
      Where were you a mechanic that it only cost “a few pennies”? I feel like I get bled dry every time I take my car in...
      - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
        I don't know myself, but if the big expense is parts not salary, both can be true. The vehicle manufacturer would be the one capturing the profits of the overpriced band-name parts.
      - datavirtue 6y ago
        Mechanics work ungodly hours and deal with very painful situations and barely make a living wage that can support a family. You feel like you are getting bled dry because the service does not scale. A highly trained professional has to focus on your problem until it is fixed and the solution is often very time consuming. Insurance costs are high and so are labor and material costs. It doesn't mean the mechanics are making a killing. The owners are often well off though. Hiring more mechanics scales for them.
- moonbug 6y ago
  your periodic reminder that Excel is programming.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Respectfully, I don't think it's insightful to point out that Excel is Turing complete. That's a technical curiosity, it doesn't inform our discussion here. The boundaries of what we call 'software development' are fuzzy, but that's true for all sorts of things. Assembling a computer doesn't make you an electronic engineer, despite that you're building a complex electronic system. If a high school teacher comes up with a basic arithmetic question that, by coincidence, has never been asked before, the teacher still doesn't count as a research mathematician for solving it.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      I think you misunderstood the point (or they edited the comment). Excel is user programmed automation, and it’s incredibly wide spread.
    - moonbug 6y ago
      "Excel as technical curiosity". Peak SV.
  - nullserver 6y ago
    It’s also extremely productive. Management always thinks a new web report / dashboard will solve all the problems. Team then spends a week or month building said report into system. Only to find that it doesn’t help anything. Six months of iterations later it’s correct and useful. Or have someone build a one off report in excel. Iterate a few times that afternoon until it’s correct. Then it’s handed off to developers. Avoiding months of rework.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Writing is a skilled craft, and will remain so, especially at professional levels. But we still teach everyone the basics.
b3kart 6y ago
> Literacy of employees and customers transform(s/ed) all industries but we don't talk about the literacy department or literacy investments in corporations. Well, we do, it's just called the "copywriting department". :-) Literacy is important for modern business, some people are better at it than others, corporations pay such people to focus on literacy. Same goes for software development: yes, it's rapidly getting commoditised, but I don't think software development as a profession is going anywhere any time soon.
amelius 6y ago
Every business person with the money can hire a bunch of coders to do the actual work. So I don't think "software literacy" is or will be a thing.
- junon 6y ago
  Typical HN crowd upset that people don't agree with their technomancer future and down voting anyone who says software engineering is hard. You're right, in the same way why math literacy still isn't a thing.
simiano 6y ago
I rarely reply to a comment here on HN. But yours resonated with me. Software as a new form of literacy is a good mental model. Also "You cannot compensate for lack of literacy in a company or society" is spot on. Thank you.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Thank you :-) I am actually writing a book about this and a few other ideas - watch out for "the software mind".
youerbt 6y ago
It's not clear to me what you mean by software. Software is just a tool and writing software is also just a tool, more often than not, not that interesting in itself. Solving problems using software is the goal and can be realized with various ways, like those low-code solutions you mention. This is why I'm becoming more and more unhappy about calling myself a programmer. It just doesn't have that "problem-solving using computer technology" ring to it.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  Agreed. Programmers code. Developers build software. Most software engineers work under a developer (business subject matter expert, slash, product owner) as programmers. The person who envisions and specifies the features is the developer. The person who translates those into code is a software engineer or programmer. Sometimes they are the same person. In the corporate world, rarely ever. In the corporate world if the software engineer can capture and document a business domain's processes then they are effectively taking the job role of developer from the product owner. Most people are comfortable leaving that in the hands of someone else and making it "their job." Engineers have the chance to take power but rarely do because they get caught up in the weeds of trying to covert a trickle of requirements into code because...agile. Developer Hegemony, when are we going to wake up?
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  >>> It's not clear to me what you mean by software. >>> This is why I'm becoming more and more unhappy about calling myself a programmer. Patio11 wrote about this and it is a good piece of advice - essentially it means sell your service (labour) as the value it can produce not the time it takes. This is a common piece of business as ice and is dry sensible. But the main point is, as a software coder / developer / programmer, for most business areas software provides excess leverage and so the amount of value you can produce is greater than fir same time of a non-coder. However to do value based charging involves other skills - negotiation, domain knowledge, lead generation and lots of meetings that go nowhere. But even if you don't do the latter part that software still can produce outsize leveraged returns for effort input. You just won't get a cut :-( That does not mean you did not help create the value
hypermachine 6y ago
Low code isn't inherently that bad as long as it offers a way to integrate with traditional code. Microsoft Excel is tremendously succesful in this area.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  Low code isn't bad until you try to use a lot of it just like OOP isn't bad until you use too much of it. There is always a temptation that leads one to use too much of these. We have had low-code visual software design for decades. SQL Server Integration Services comes to mind. It does not solve the core problem. Maintainability. The last thing software needs is an invitation to more people that aren't yet aware of the problems of maintenance. There is not an extremely high barrier to coding. That is not a problem. There is a huge barrier to learning how to produce maintainable and adaptive systems and that barrier is only made worse with low-code tools and services.
  - jgalentine007 6y ago
    I worked with adding some functionality to a Microsoft PowerApp Covid office tracker template. Having to navigate the GUI for everything was quite cumbersome. Although it was only two function calls in two places, it seems that every time the template is updated, the calls will have to be added back. Instead of doing a merge in Git, you will now have to remember all the navigation steps to add the changes each time. I don't want to think about what happens if you have more than one person working on an app.
    - hypermachine 6y ago
      We have automatic version control for our platform, give us a try when we launch.
jamesgreenleaf 6y ago
There's a corollary with illiteracy but for mathematics, called innumeracy. Perhaps there's another for software, which is essentially a language of logic. It could be called illogicity. You could make up your own term if you don't like that one. Literature is not just spelling and grammar, and mathematics is not just numbers and equations. Likewise, software is not just code and computers. Each of these are ways of thinking, methods of communicating, realms to explore, and systems for organizing the world. I would not be surprised if there are other systems like these which we have not yet discovered or invented. At least, I hope that there are.
- bob1029 6y ago
  I like this perspective. It also hints at a potential resolution - Pull the team away from the technology for a little while so they can focus on the abstract problem domain. Most developers probably don't have the capacity to think about shiny new technology while simultaneously running traps on the fundamental business domain abstractions. Taking time away from the computer to think about the problem you are actually trying to solve is a big deal. Many just get caught up fighting their own tools and lose sight. One simple trick - If you are not yet at a point where you can cleanly model your problem domain in terms of SQL tables & relations (even if you don't intend to use this technology), you have absolutely no business touching the rest of the effort. There are notions that you can actually have a provably-correct model of your domain at a certain level. 3NF/BCNF schemas have fundamental mathematical implications that are very powerful. Entire classes of accidental complexity can be obviated with a clean domain model.
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    Yes. I think it is a Brooks quote that is something like "don't show me your code - I won't understand it, show me your database and I will understand your application." Simple robust Data structures with complicated code acting on it.
    - thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
      "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." -- Dr. Fred Brooks
Qwertious 6y ago
>I am going to bang on about this again, but imo software is a new form of literacy. The four Rs: Reading, writing, 'rithmetic, R. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language) )
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  Did you make that up? I love it.
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    Yes, I made it up just now.
- enobrev 6y ago
  RAWR. Reading Arithmetic Writing R
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> It's what annoys me about low-code solutions - it's like trying to write your novel by linking pre-drawn cartoon squares together in innovative ways. There's a reason societies which switched from hieroglyphics to alphabets have higher literacy rates—the best way to promote widespread literacy is to make it easy and accessible. Before the pandemic shut us down, I was a volunteer teacher at Girls Who Code. We used Scratch, which I was a bit skeptical of at first, but then I watched the ten-year-old students struggle to type a sentence at three words per minute. In Scratch that didn't matter—they could create all sorts of programs. In a different context, while I'm not personally a fan of complex spreadsheets, they seem to be effective for a lot of people, who I suspect would otherwise struggle with Python. To be sure, Scratch and Excel are still much slower and clunkier than "real", text-based languages. But I'm not convinced that typing words into a text editor is the ultimate way to create software. And even if it is, we've got to find a way to make this stuff easier, because I don't want to live in a society where a handful of elites are able to make computers do their bidding, and everyone else is left to consume the scraps offered from on high.
- sombremesa 6y ago
  > There's a reason societies which switched from hieroglyphics to alphabets have higher literacy rates—the best way to promote widespread literacy is to make it easy and accessible. Source? This seems to have a lot more to do with socio-economics and politics than linguistics.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I see them as all tied together. Rising literacy rates increase standards of living. Rising standards of living leave time to learn to read. More people reading creates pressure to make reading easier. And so the cycle continues.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Agreed - many tasks can be done with more accessible tools. It's why Excel is so popular. It's why modal editors suck for the majority of humanity. For most people and most applications, WYSIWYG is fine and allows people to use the computer to do their work. We'll still need the more sophisticated tooling for a long time, but even that becomes more niche once it gets really good. Most developers are not writing assembly or machine code. Layers of abstraction can and do work, but every time a new one comes it's often viewed skeptically. Nocode is a little different in the way that excel is limiting too, but that doesn't mean it can still solve a lot of the problem space for a lot of people if done well. Introducing young kids to programming seems like a reasonable place for it. I think AI assisted programming will be interesting, both in the form of Karpathy's blog post: https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 and also just to assist alongisde the dev. GPT-3 style, "center this on the page" -> correct CSS. Fast feedback via NLP here will be really interesting and helpful. We used to have to look up stuff in books, then there was google and stack overflow, it'd be nice to be able to ask random questions and get the answer instantly in code in front of you. This is a great related blog post if you haven't read it: http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
mgummelt 6y ago
The novel analogy is the right one, but it works against your point. Everyone needs to write. Few need to write novels. Just like increasingly everyone needs to write software, but few need to be engineers.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Everyone can write a novel. A lot of HNers have a word count in the (short) novel length without worrying. I think the issue is most software developers are paid full time to write. Pay me full time to write novels and you can have an endless supply of low quality Dan Brown. I think the novel analogy is useful - there are an awful lot of novels being published (even more self published). Most are drivel ... unfortunately similar to the quality distribution of software. Very few people and less organisations are capable of consistently great writing. In my view we should be aiming for seeing what makes something like the Washington Post work. This is a agglomeration of skilled people who manage to write a coherent trilogy of novels every day. Being literate is only the first challenge - building literate organisations is a much harder one.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Extra ranting: It's worth noting that there are a lot of businesses that also "do not fit in one persons head". Anyone who has spent time in a large organisation will be constantly coming across processes that seem designed solely to prevent anything happening and knowing how to get around it is a hidden mystery. I am sure there are billion dollar departments in my company I have no idea exist. And it's dubious that at any sufficiently large organisation it is truly understood by upper management - almost every corporate failure can be attributed to something like "Yes of course I know how engines work, we can move the forwards quite easily"
fukmbas 6y ago
Coders are becoming dime a dozen. I would tell future generations to steer clear and specialize. There's a lot more to it than programming
klelatti 6y ago
Successful "tech" companies need to have a (relatively) small number of people who understand the possibilities that software open up for their business model. They have a number of people who are skilled at managing the software and product development process and a (potentially large) number of people who are skilled at software development. Seems to me to be very different to the notion of literacy which is a set of skills that essentially every employee needs to have.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> software is a new form of literacy Do you mean basic skills in using a desktop computer, or do you mean software engineering skills? > we don't talk about the literacy department Software development is a skilled craft, and will remain so.

nickthemagicman 6y ago
Reading itself used to be considered a skilled craft. Only 4% of people knew how to read during the middle ages. Mostly clergy and civil servants. The grandparent poster is right imo. If programming becomes just another thing everyone knows, and takes a software class every year like they take an English class, the world will be way better off.
- colinb 6y ago
  Interesting idea. Will everyone spend the next twenty years complaining about how much they hated Mrs Jones the programming teacher and how Stroustrup ruined programming for them? Put it another way. The reason we interview people the way that we do, is because it isn't realistic (unfortunately) to expect that a CS grad can fizz-buzz, or delete from a linked list, or whatever. Anyone who has spent a little time interviewing can confirm this. Why should we expect that secondary education would do a better job?
  - nickthemagicman 6y ago
    If they were taught this kind of thing from an extremely young age in school every year these interviews would be trivial, Just like speaking your native language is trivial.
    - dasudasu 6y ago
      We don't quite reach a very high degree of practical math literacy even though everyone is taught from a young age. Calculus considered as "incredibly difficult" being an example.
      - fakedang 6y ago
        I know a lot of students who would not understand the idea behind calculus concepts, even though they knew the formulae. They simply could not grasp a very simple thing like "area under the curve" or "Slope of a curve". This was at a large private school with a selective admissions process. I know for a fact that my college educated parents (50+) would not know how to solve a calculus problem. So yeah, Calculus is a pretty bad example because it IS incredibly difficult for the general population.
        nickthemagicman 6y ago
        I don't know if this is like a smarts thing or just a poor math education thing.
        6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
        As someone who does math for a living, I’m always frustrated because I truly believe it’s a poor math education thing. But then people just respond, “oh MYNAME, you just think that because you’re good at it/you’re a math person.” As if that made the point less valid rather than more valid.
      - nickthemagicman 6y ago
        I completely agree with you. I think it's a failure of the school system from a very early age because math is heavily dependent on foundations of previous classes. And I think it's more than just sharing the information we have to also make rational thinking fields as fun and cool as the emotional expression fields of study like English or Music and not the domain of 'nerds'. I think our whole culture would be way better off if people had better critical thinking logic and math skills.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  The important difference between programming and reading/writing is that written language is just another representation of natural language. All the complexity is in understanding and using natural language. Reading itself is trivial once you have some practice. Programming on the other hand is creating new abstractions (i.e modelling). It never becomes trivial, because it's not just a new encoding of existing abstractions. I think programming is no different than maths. Yes, everyone will have to know a little bit of it, but very few will be capable of modelling complex problems or implementing large software systems.
  - nickthemagicman 6y ago
    Language is just a tool to express a collection of ideas. The reason programming is not an extension of our natural language is because we haven't included those concepts in our natural language yet. The world would be way better off if everyone had better logic and analytical thinking ability
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    By saying " ed few can do the hard stuff", is that not redefining use of maths to an arbitrary cutoff line. Think of all the instances of maths used globally. Do the millions of people who more or less get the idea of an average - this is used across politics, and common discourse. Does that count as maths? I would say yes, just as a for loop is programming. No we are not expecting a compiler but just "arranging the world so it can be easily iterated over" is a fine common objective.
    - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
      >Does that count as maths? Yes, that's exactly what I meant when I said "a little bit of it".
  - jart 6y ago
    Well lots of people can read and write, but few people are able to write a good novel. Everyone I know who isn't necessarily a software engineer but has basic programming skills has benefited from that knowledge. For example with everyday office work there's a big difference between someone who's able to use Word and someone who's able to use Access. The latter requires programming know-how. Also shell scripts and automation. It has a huge productivity amplifying impact.
- maxwell 6y ago
  Agreed. Widespread ability to read and write natural language seems to've, eventually, made written constitutions not so-much "viable" but "necessary". It's easy to forget how innovative the U.S. Constitution was for being written, content aside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions Definitely excited about the social implications of widespread ability to read and write executable language in the long run, note when France crossed 50% literacy though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiteracy_france.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiterac...
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  I think I am the grandparent - and yes I agree, software is going to be table stakes for the next generation of corporate players (and by implication, those corporates who cannot will mean a huge gap opening up). It's not just "can my employees write a for loop" but it's "do we store data sensibly, when upper management wants a report is there a data history stretching back to the raw (ie no manual involvement). Do we all publish APIs and work through those defined interfaces - and many more.
gonzo41 6y ago
Software development is a skilled craft, and will remain so. Yes, you're right, but i would take the meaning that understanding Software development and deployment and how that can be leveraged is a literacy. There's tons of IT transformation disasters because the companies upping their literacy get stuck with knowing the words (SOA and Agile) but don't know how to make coherent use of them. Most projects these days are IT projects. Think about it like a dev, Software on a computer is useful. Networked software is more useful. Cloud and IaaS is really useful, SaaS is a really really useful and knowing when to use each to actually get stuff done is the most useful of all.
- FpUser 6y ago
  >"Software on a computer is useful. Networked software is more useful. Cloud and IaaS is really useful, SaaS is a really really useful" I actually prefer the reverse progression as the closer it is to my computer / my server the less I spend on feeding somebody else's insatiable appetites. Being connected is one thing. Giving somebody else more and more control over your business is totally different.
junon 6y ago
Man it really sucks this is being down voted. Software engineering is not like reading. Reading conveys information about reality. Software code conveys solutions to problems. The latter requires understanding of computers, problem solving, domains, etc. Just like I can't pick up a book about organic chemistry and understand it, people are not going to some day care to know about how distributed systems algorithms work. It is indeed a skilled craft and this weird, cyberpunk-ian idea that everyone will just converge on technical literacy is very hand wavey and ignores simple facts like some people just not having ANY interest in computers or tech.
- jfim 6y ago
  Literacy is actually a good analogy. People have different reading abilities, but they're all under the umbrella of literacy. Some people are illiterate, some people can read simple documents but struggle with higher complexity texts and contracts, and some people can breeze through high complexity texts. In the same way, some people struggle with computers, some are able to understand Excel spreadsheets, some are able to understand business logic expressed in a domain specific language, and some are able to read complex programs.
SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
I use the motor vehicle metaphor: Software literacy is equivalent to: being able to drive a car, fuel it, decode the various dashboard lights when they blink, maybe change a tire and check the oil. Software engineering is: Being a car mechanic. So is it very useful to society if the vast majority of adults are able to drive. It is not important or worth the effort to have a majority of adults as fully trained car mechanics. Although it is good to have "on ramps" for those with the aptitude and inclination to pick it up, as a useful and paying job. It is _now_ useful to society if the vast majority of adults are able to use a maps app, a messaging app, a word processor, maybe a formula in spreadsheet, calendar a zoom call and unmute themselves, have email and can distinguish a phishing email from real bank communications, ignore fake news on social media, etc. The difference between a formula in a spreadsheet and full-time coding is one of degree, not kind; but you could say the same about changing a tire vs. a full vehicle overhaul.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  I used to be a mechanic and the analogy fits. Rich people drive into the shop and bark at you to "just fix it." They don't care about any of the minutia but it had better work they way they envision it working. Then they throw you a few pennies and drive off.
  - gpanders 6y ago
    Where were you a mechanic that it only cost “a few pennies”? I feel like I get bled dry every time I take my car in...
    - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
      I don't know myself, but if the big expense is parts not salary, both can be true. The vehicle manufacturer would be the one capturing the profits of the overpriced band-name parts.
    - datavirtue 6y ago
      Mechanics work ungodly hours and deal with very painful situations and barely make a living wage that can support a family. You feel like you are getting bled dry because the service does not scale. A highly trained professional has to focus on your problem until it is fixed and the solution is often very time consuming. Insurance costs are high and so are labor and material costs. It doesn't mean the mechanics are making a killing. The owners are often well off though. Hiring more mechanics scales for them.
moonbug 6y ago
your periodic reminder that Excel is programming.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Respectfully, I don't think it's insightful to point out that Excel is Turing complete. That's a technical curiosity, it doesn't inform our discussion here. The boundaries of what we call 'software development' are fuzzy, but that's true for all sorts of things. Assembling a computer doesn't make you an electronic engineer, despite that you're building a complex electronic system. If a high school teacher comes up with a basic arithmetic question that, by coincidence, has never been asked before, the teacher still doesn't count as a research mathematician for solving it.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    I think you misunderstood the point (or they edited the comment). Excel is user programmed automation, and it’s incredibly wide spread.
  - moonbug 6y ago
    "Excel as technical curiosity". Peak SV.
- nullserver 6y ago
  It’s also extremely productive. Management always thinks a new web report / dashboard will solve all the problems. Team then spends a week or month building said report into system. Only to find that it doesn’t help anything. Six months of iterations later it’s correct and useful. Or have someone build a one off report in excel. Iterate a few times that afternoon until it’s correct. Then it’s handed off to developers. Avoiding months of rework.
andrewflnr 6y ago
Writing is a skilled craft, and will remain so, especially at professional levels. But we still teach everyone the basics.

b3kart 6y ago

> Literacy of employees and customers transform(s/ed) all industries but we don't talk about the literacy department or literacy investments in corporations. Well, we do, it's just called the "copywriting department". :-) Literacy is important for modern business, some people are better at it than others, corporations pay such people to focus on literacy. Same goes for software development: yes, it's rapidly getting commoditised, but I don't think software development as a profession is going anywhere any time soon.

amelius 6y ago

Every business person with the money can hire a bunch of coders to do the actual work. So I don't think "software literacy" is or will be a thing.

junon 6y ago
Typical HN crowd upset that people don't agree with their technomancer future and down voting anyone who says software engineering is hard. You're right, in the same way why math literacy still isn't a thing.

simiano 6y ago

I rarely reply to a comment here on HN. But yours resonated with me. Software as a new form of literacy is a good mental model. Also "You cannot compensate for lack of literacy in a company or society" is spot on. Thank you.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Thank you :-) I am actually writing a book about this and a few other ideas - watch out for "the software mind".

youerbt 6y ago

It's not clear to me what you mean by software. Software is just a tool and writing software is also just a tool, more often than not, not that interesting in itself. Solving problems using software is the goal and can be realized with various ways, like those low-code solutions you mention. This is why I'm becoming more and more unhappy about calling myself a programmer. It just doesn't have that "problem-solving using computer technology" ring to it.

datavirtue 6y ago
Agreed. Programmers code. Developers build software. Most software engineers work under a developer (business subject matter expert, slash, product owner) as programmers. The person who envisions and specifies the features is the developer. The person who translates those into code is a software engineer or programmer. Sometimes they are the same person. In the corporate world, rarely ever. In the corporate world if the software engineer can capture and document a business domain's processes then they are effectively taking the job role of developer from the product owner. Most people are comfortable leaving that in the hands of someone else and making it "their job." Engineers have the chance to take power but rarely do because they get caught up in the weeds of trying to covert a trickle of requirements into code because...agile. Developer Hegemony, when are we going to wake up?
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
>>> It's not clear to me what you mean by software. >>> This is why I'm becoming more and more unhappy about calling myself a programmer. Patio11 wrote about this and it is a good piece of advice - essentially it means sell your service (labour) as the value it can produce not the time it takes. This is a common piece of business as ice and is dry sensible. But the main point is, as a software coder / developer / programmer, for most business areas software provides excess leverage and so the amount of value you can produce is greater than fir same time of a non-coder. However to do value based charging involves other skills - negotiation, domain knowledge, lead generation and lots of meetings that go nowhere. But even if you don't do the latter part that software still can produce outsize leveraged returns for effort input. You just won't get a cut :-( That does not mean you did not help create the value

hypermachine 6y ago

Low code isn't inherently that bad as long as it offers a way to integrate with traditional code. Microsoft Excel is tremendously succesful in this area.

datavirtue 6y ago
Low code isn't bad until you try to use a lot of it just like OOP isn't bad until you use too much of it. There is always a temptation that leads one to use too much of these. We have had low-code visual software design for decades. SQL Server Integration Services comes to mind. It does not solve the core problem. Maintainability. The last thing software needs is an invitation to more people that aren't yet aware of the problems of maintenance. There is not an extremely high barrier to coding. That is not a problem. There is a huge barrier to learning how to produce maintainable and adaptive systems and that barrier is only made worse with low-code tools and services.
- jgalentine007 6y ago
  I worked with adding some functionality to a Microsoft PowerApp Covid office tracker template. Having to navigate the GUI for everything was quite cumbersome. Although it was only two function calls in two places, it seems that every time the template is updated, the calls will have to be added back. Instead of doing a merge in Git, you will now have to remember all the navigation steps to add the changes each time. I don't want to think about what happens if you have more than one person working on an app.
  - hypermachine 6y ago
    We have automatic version control for our platform, give us a try when we launch.

jamesgreenleaf 6y ago

There's a corollary with illiteracy but for mathematics, called innumeracy. Perhaps there's another for software, which is essentially a language of logic. It could be called illogicity. You could make up your own term if you don't like that one. Literature is not just spelling and grammar, and mathematics is not just numbers and equations. Likewise, software is not just code and computers. Each of these are ways of thinking, methods of communicating, realms to explore, and systems for organizing the world. I would not be surprised if there are other systems like these which we have not yet discovered or invented. At least, I hope that there are.

bob1029 6y ago
I like this perspective. It also hints at a potential resolution - Pull the team away from the technology for a little while so they can focus on the abstract problem domain. Most developers probably don't have the capacity to think about shiny new technology while simultaneously running traps on the fundamental business domain abstractions. Taking time away from the computer to think about the problem you are actually trying to solve is a big deal. Many just get caught up fighting their own tools and lose sight. One simple trick - If you are not yet at a point where you can cleanly model your problem domain in terms of SQL tables & relations (even if you don't intend to use this technology), you have absolutely no business touching the rest of the effort. There are notions that you can actually have a provably-correct model of your domain at a certain level. 3NF/BCNF schemas have fundamental mathematical implications that are very powerful. Entire classes of accidental complexity can be obviated with a clean domain model.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Yes. I think it is a Brooks quote that is something like "don't show me your code - I won't understand it, show me your database and I will understand your application." Simple robust Data structures with complicated code acting on it.
  - thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
    "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." -- Dr. Fred Brooks

Qwertious 6y ago

>I am going to bang on about this again, but imo software is a new form of literacy. The four Rs: Reading, writing, 'rithmetic, R. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language) )

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
Did you make that up? I love it.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  Yes, I made it up just now.
enobrev 6y ago
RAWR. Reading Arithmetic Writing R

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

> It's what annoys me about low-code solutions - it's like trying to write your novel by linking pre-drawn cartoon squares together in innovative ways. There's a reason societies which switched from hieroglyphics to alphabets have higher literacy rates—the best way to promote widespread literacy is to make it easy and accessible. Before the pandemic shut us down, I was a volunteer teacher at Girls Who Code. We used Scratch, which I was a bit skeptical of at first, but then I watched the ten-year-old students struggle to type a sentence at three words per minute. In Scratch that didn't matter—they could create all sorts of programs. In a different context, while I'm not personally a fan of complex spreadsheets, they seem to be effective for a lot of people, who I suspect would otherwise struggle with Python. To be sure, Scratch and Excel are still much slower and clunkier than "real", text-based languages. But I'm not convinced that typing words into a text editor is the ultimate way to create software. And even if it is, we've got to find a way to make this stuff easier, because I don't want to live in a society where a handful of elites are able to make computers do their bidding, and everyone else is left to consume the scraps offered from on high.

sombremesa 6y ago
> There's a reason societies which switched from hieroglyphics to alphabets have higher literacy rates—the best way to promote widespread literacy is to make it easy and accessible. Source? This seems to have a lot more to do with socio-economics and politics than linguistics.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I see them as all tied together. Rising literacy rates increase standards of living. Rising standards of living leave time to learn to read. More people reading creates pressure to make reading easier. And so the cycle continues.
fossuser 6y ago
Agreed - many tasks can be done with more accessible tools. It's why Excel is so popular. It's why modal editors suck for the majority of humanity. For most people and most applications, WYSIWYG is fine and allows people to use the computer to do their work. We'll still need the more sophisticated tooling for a long time, but even that becomes more niche once it gets really good. Most developers are not writing assembly or machine code. Layers of abstraction can and do work, but every time a new one comes it's often viewed skeptically. Nocode is a little different in the way that excel is limiting too, but that doesn't mean it can still solve a lot of the problem space for a lot of people if done well. Introducing young kids to programming seems like a reasonable place for it. I think AI assisted programming will be interesting, both in the form of Karpathy's blog post: https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 and also just to assist alongisde the dev. GPT-3 style, "center this on the page" -> correct CSS. Fast feedback via NLP here will be really interesting and helpful. We used to have to look up stuff in books, then there was google and stack overflow, it'd be nice to be able to ask random questions and get the answer instantly in code in front of you. This is a great related blog post if you haven't read it: http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

mgummelt 6y ago

The novel analogy is the right one, but it works against your point. Everyone needs to write. Few need to write novels. Just like increasingly everyone needs to write software, but few need to be engineers.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Everyone can write a novel. A lot of HNers have a word count in the (short) novel length without worrying. I think the issue is most software developers are paid full time to write. Pay me full time to write novels and you can have an endless supply of low quality Dan Brown. I think the novel analogy is useful - there are an awful lot of novels being published (even more self published). Most are drivel ... unfortunately similar to the quality distribution of software. Very few people and less organisations are capable of consistently great writing. In my view we should be aiming for seeing what makes something like the Washington Post work. This is a agglomeration of skilled people who manage to write a coherent trilogy of novels every day. Being literate is only the first challenge - building literate organisations is a much harder one.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

Extra ranting: It's worth noting that there are a lot of businesses that also "do not fit in one persons head". Anyone who has spent time in a large organisation will be constantly coming across processes that seem designed solely to prevent anything happening and knowing how to get around it is a hidden mystery. I am sure there are billion dollar departments in my company I have no idea exist. And it's dubious that at any sufficiently large organisation it is truly understood by upper management - almost every corporate failure can be attributed to something like "Yes of course I know how engines work, we can move the forwards quite easily"

fukmbas 6y ago

Coders are becoming dime a dozen. I would tell future generations to steer clear and specialize. There's a lot more to it than programming

klelatti 6y ago

Successful "tech" companies need to have a (relatively) small number of people who understand the possibilities that software open up for their business model. They have a number of people who are skilled at managing the software and product development process and a (potentially large) number of people who are skilled at software development. Seems to me to be very different to the notion of literacy which is a set of skills that essentially every employee needs to have.