23 ms·

Teach kids to farm, not code.

140 points by kimburgess 14y ago

logn 14y ago
This article presents a nuanced point, and I agree with it. My response to this quote by Steve Burgess (not the author): "Why are programmers granted such high status and wealth in our society for living in a self-created self-indulgant intellectual world of constant escapism- and yet farmers are regarded with such distain when they operate on the most important boundary between society and the biosphere?" ... would have been: I disagree with your premise. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE (God Made a Farmer) and see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGJX6t3IAlk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGJX6t3IAlk (GoDaddy Bar Refaeli Super Bowl Commercial).
- kriro 14y ago
  Farmers have historically played with the fears of mankind and have lobbying power that rivals big tobacco in many countries. "More moneyz for the farmers or everyone will starve to death." They also tend to use somewhat stereotypical stuff depicting themselves as heroes that feed the homeland which just rubs me the wrong way. Add the "leave this farmland empty and make more money than actually farming on it" government handout abuse (+ all sorts of economic meddling that makes very little sense) and you pretty much get the mixture of why I don't grant farmers a high status by default. Big industry farming is also fairly disgusting. I'm not really an animal rights type of guy and more of the "whatever humans eat animals such is life" kind of school but what is happening in industry farming makes me pretty sick. [I'm obviously aggregating over all farmers here but by and large I wouldn't start out assuming a farmer was noble] Edit: that's obviously way off topic. My answer to the OP would be...teach kids to enjoy learning and exploring and not some specific craft. The rest will follow automatically. Programming as a craft works well because it tends to force you to learn and explore as a side effect (same for anything scientific really)
- walshemj 14y ago
  Given the amount of government subvention and subsidies compered to Farmers we are very very low down on the totem pole. In the EU in 20010 €43.8bn (31% of the EU budget) compared to the support that STEM industries get this is far more. Blue states like CA and MA support the smaller interior agricultural red states - the USA is set up to favor farmers. You don't get satire like Farmer Palmer in VIZ from nothimg
  - gammarator 14y ago
    California has the most agricultural output of any state in the US, fyi: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/agricultural-productivity-in-the-us.aspx#28270 http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/agricultural-productiv...
wfunction 14y ago
"Why are [...] farmers are regarded with such distain [...]?" They are? I haven't seen people feel that way, so I'm kind of surprised to read this. Some references to evidence that supports this claim might be useful.
- adamnemecek 14y ago
  Same with "Why are programmers granted such high status...". I was not aware that programmers had a particularly high social status.
  - Turing_Machine 14y ago
    http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/28/leadership-careers-jobs-cx_tvr_0728admired.html http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/28/leadership-careers-jobs-cx_... Farmer and engineer are about the same, with farmer having a slight edge.
    - jasonlotito 14y ago
      Engineer, not programmer. Judging by the picture, I'm pretty sure they aren't referring to the computer "engineer."
      - wfunction 14y ago
        Software engineer?
PeterisP 14y ago
The big point is actually that currently we (as in, the whole world) have far more farmers than we need (especially in the developing countries) and less coders than we need. And in the future, automation and coders will ensure that we will need even less farmers. How much population do we really need to tend all global arable land using modern methods machinery? Currently in developed countries it's somewhere near 2%, depending on the local crops used; in time it may be 1% as more and more things can now be done by machines. Countries such as India and China currently have hundreds of millions of farmers; but the same result can be produced by half or less people with farming methods currently used in USA/EU. Right now a lot of modern grain farm work consists of driving equipment around all your fields - and self-driving tractors will eliminate even that remainder "manual" work.
- randomdata 14y ago
  Driving the equipment around is the fun part, but not the real work that goes into the business. Farming is actually quite challenging. A recent problem I remember having on my farm: Soil is full of wet lumps of clay, unsuitable for planting, cultivators are not breaking them up and you have a few day window to fix the problem before it gets too late into the season to plant the crop. What do you do? I actually agree that the point is to attract more programmers into the industry, but the consequences of that seem dangerous. What happens when we have too many programmers? Should coding classes be dropped from the system?
  - XorNot 14y ago
    Coding practice scales. Farming does not. If you have a smartphone, you have (potentially) a programming platform. We can't simply give everyone on the planet a few acres of farmland to get to grips with the challenges of farming.
    - cpressey 14y ago
      I dunno. There are vast patches of ocean that are going pretty much unused right now. (Yes, I know that's still science-fiction, but is it really that much more of a stretch than the AI/robot/automation "software will eat the world" firm-belief that you see daily on HN?)
raverbashing 14y ago
Yes, farming is hard, very hard Most here don't appreciate how hard it is (especially if you're inexperienced) Do people still grow beans using a cotton in a cup? Do they still teach that at schools? That's basically the 'hello world' of farming Of course, depends on what you are doing, type of plants, inside a greenhouse or in an open field, the scale of it etc. Not to mention raising animals. That's very hard as well It's unsurprising that it's getting ever more 'industry like'. You take a lot of people and specialize in only a few crops, so you can have profits that work out. Machines are expensive, fertilizer, soil analysis, etc, etc And then there's a climate issue, too much rain, too cold, too warm and you miss the mark.
- ivanmilles 14y ago
  >That's basically the 'hello world' of farming This is an extremely fascinating perspective. I need to go... build something. Wow.
- vollmarj 14y ago
  You are absolutely correct. I grew up on a farm and I'm now building FarmLogs because of how tough farming can be. Maybe introducing better technology into the farm can blend both programming and farming.
- contingencies 14y ago
  The selection of cotton is an interesting one, for if the product were edible the children might get the idea they didn't need to work for money.
singular 14y ago
"This thing #{X} that I am inexperienced at is much harder than this thing #{Y} I spent years doing because I am experienced at #{Y} and have some idea how to do it and thus it feels comfortable. Why, I am going to go so far as to talk down everybody who still does #{Y}, partly because I'm somewhat burnt out on it, and partly because my comparative experience makes me feel like it's easy compared to #{X}." Where:- * X, Y are very broad fields in which there is a whole range of tasks which span from the very simple to the insanely difficult, * X, Y both revolutionised the world at different points in human history, X before Y.
- coldtea 14y ago
  X indeed revolutionised the world. Y just made porn delivery and commerce better. It's not even clear at this point if it had any effect (besides negative) to the global intellectual climate.
  - patrickaljord 14y ago
    Ok, this is a real low for HN. Are you actually saying that the only thing computing has done for the world is better porn delivery and better commerce? Wow. Do you have any idea how we managed to decode our genome so fast? Any idea that every science labs including maths have computers to test their hypothesis and solve their equations at such a huge scale and speed no human being could possibly dream to match? How about communication? How about almost anything you use today to make your life easier has a computer chip in it? How about making the bulk of human knowledge available to anyone with an internet connection even in remote poor areas of the world where adults can barely read such as Peru where I lived for years? I could go on but I think you get the idea.
    - coldtea 14y ago
      >Ok, this is a real low for HN. Are you actually saying that the only thing computing has done for the world is better porn delivery and better commerce? Wow. Do you have any idea how we managed to decode our genome so fast? Any idea that every science labs including maths have computers to test their hypothesis and solve their equations at such a huge scale and speed no human being could possibly dream to match? How about communication? How about almost anything you use today to make your life easier has a computer chip in it? Making my life slightly easier is not that important -- and hardly what I'd call a world changing event in the scale of agricultural revolution or even the industrial revolution. I understand that as CS people we like to sing our own praises, but just like once you have electric ovens, getting a microwave is not that big of progress (if it's not a throwback to a worse method of heating), similarly, once you have global trade routes, ships, trains, cars, snail mail, telegraphs and telephones, having computerised version of communication is not that much of a step forward. The world is not that different, including everyday life, from 40 years ago, when computers were mostly unknown outside of large companies. We just play more videogames, watch more cat videos, and exchange more (than zero) BS instant messages and mails. Quantitative is not qualitative difference. As for the use of computers in science: again, quantitative is not qualitative difference. The most involved and mind-boggling discoveries were done before computers, from evolution, to relativity, to quantum mechanics, to the DNA. We are now better at number crunching (such as decoding the genome), that doesn't mean we produce science of equal impact.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
In competitive environments, low-tech occupations tend to lose as a group. Take any mass farming. Tea collectors, for example, I believe they're paid so little they are in constant poverty. Why are they paid that way? They collect all the tea people around the world drink. Paying them the increase of the cost of a tea bag by 1 cent will make them comparatively rich. Why isn't it done? They have no bargaining power. Anyone can collect tea badly enough, this is true for most agricultural labour. It is physically hard but you can teach it in half an our. So they can always be easily replaced either with local population or with some illegal immigrants. In the developed world, a lot of people just pass documents around and make phone calls. It's the sophistication of zooplankton and physically much less demanding than agricultural jobs, but you can't quite teach it to anyone in the world in half an hour - you need locals for this (they connect to other people and need to fit culturally) and they need some even very basic skills. So they get paid with actual money you can buy things with. Take coders. Training a coder is not easy and it even requires some aptitude. Thus, even mediocre coders can often command their rules to their employers. And great coders are true citizens of the world, employable anywhere on their terms. So, to make farming cool we have to make it high-tech. Another problem is that farming doesn't seem very profitable even on the large / capital scale, because the barrier to entry is so low.
- randomdata 14y ago
  > Another problem is that farming doesn't seem very profitable even on the large / capital scale, because the barrier to entry is so low. For what it is worth, I make considerably more money per hour farming than I do programming, and I get paid quite well to be a programmer. With farming, however, the barrier to entry is actually quite high. That barrier being access to capital. It is the massive debt any normal person has to take on to even think about farming that cripples most. Programmers are quite lucky that you only need one reasonably affordable tool, which almost everyone already owns, and you are eligible to enter the market.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    That's because you're a high-tech farmer, aren't you? Profits - capital = slim margins. If you have some "free" capital then you're lucky.
aangjie 14y ago
> but it is far far more important that all human beings >learn to interact with the natural environment and >understand the basics of food, water and shelter.” This part is my biggest take away from the post. that learn to interact with the natural environment and figure out how to create(nay, refactor/engineer/discover a better word here??) food/water/shelter from it is a hard,important and makes for a more interesting* educational goal than solving math problems or puzzles. *-- I said interesting, but i would bet that it's probably better in terms of creating a (net total) productive society(x years of education later) Disclaimer: I hadn't heard of code.org before now and i live in India.
gambiting 14y ago
I don't understand. We've spent thousands of years, using 99.9% of able-bodied people for farming, hunting or some other food-gathering activities. Only selected few could afford to NOT work in farming. Even America, just 200 years ago had 90% of its population working as farmers. Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Sure, the food industry is not always honest,not always as good as your own home-grown food, but still - it allowed us to do something else with our lives, and pushed our societies an order of magnitude ahead. As much as people should APPRECIATE farming, I don't think that everyone should do it. We produce enough food as it is. We should teach kids how to code however, not because we need more programmers(which we do,but I digress) - but because it's the easiest way to introduce kids to logical, technical-like thinking. That way we can have more mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, engineers - people who we can afford to keep alive(almost literally) because they do not need to grown their own food anymore! They can sit at their desks for the whole day, thinking how to make the world better, instead of looking at how the crops grow. I would say - why not give kids both? Is it too much to ask? Show them how vegetables are grown, how animals are cared for and how are they slaughtered, but at the same time, yes, please teach them how to code.
- barry-cotter 14y ago
  Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Look at me exercising a form of conspicuous consumption (the time of a highly educated profeasional) that my class and culture peers think are praiseworthy. Let me say everyone should indulge in my hobby. Let's look down on those who don't together.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Actually some of us do it as a context switch and a tie to our roots. Some of us, myself included consider it to be a valuable skill in an unstable world and some insurance against the fuckwits we have to trust in society. Also the stuff tastes better.
- fsniper 14y ago
  I don't believe computer programing is a good way to teach logical thinking. Sociology, Philosophy and Literature are better alternatives. Coding only makes you better micro managers, "thinking of efficient ways to make idiots do things you like". Also teaching agriculture or other physical goods producing craftsmanship to kids would make them better at real world challenges. Modern society seems to be run by digital arts but it's just an illusion of how we live.
infoman 14y ago
because robots will farm for us
empoman 14y ago
I think what most people are missing is that it's not about creating more programmers as much as it is about teaching people how to think analytically. When you're programming you try to solve a high level problem using low level techniques. The actual programming is the part where you find a solution for the high level problem with your low level tools. So again, it is not just about writing code. It is about how to approach problems and finding viable solutions, no matter what the form of the problem is. It could as well be: "How can I speed up the harvesting on my farm?". Knowing programming helps us in many more situations than just writing code.
- kimburgess 14y ago
  Exactly.
- cpressey 14y ago
  I agree with your point. But to riff off dschiptsov's comment, how do you define "programming" (as opposed to, say, "coding"), and how does knowing programming help you answer questions like "How can I speed up harvesting on my farm?" I would call the ability to understand and solve those kinds of problems analysis, not programming. It used to be the case that "systems analyst" and "programmer" were two different job titles; at this point, they've largely merged, but I still see them as two different skill sets. (And then there's "software engineer" which is a whole other can of worms.)
  - empoman 14y ago
    That's a fair question, so I'll try to explain how I see it. Problem analysis as you mentioning it, to me, seems like the theoretical form of programming. So here I see "coding", or programming, as an easy way to practice problem analysis in a real context, and not just by going through a text book like we do with math in school. And I agree with you regarding programmers and system analysts. There are so many titles and job descriptions nowadays that try to look fancier than the other just to make it easier arguing for a higher salary. Even if what they do is basically the same. Here in Sweden, there is a long running "joke"-ish alternative title for a cleaner, and that is "hygiene technician". One sounds fancier than the other, but it really isn't. Regarding how speeding up the harvesting would be done, I have no idea since I am not at all familiar with how a farm works. The point I was trying to make is that if you have knowledge about the domain of farming, AND you know how to program (or if you are good at problem analysis, which I think you are if you can program), then I'm sure that it would be easier to think of something than if you weren't. Does it make sense or am I just rambling like a crazy person? :D
Nux 14y ago
There's enough farming. We should teach kids how not to waste the food.
- XorNot 14y ago
  It really doesn't matter - most of the food is not wasted by individuals, it's thrown away by corporations. There's a reason corn-products are in almost literally everything...
thenomad 14y ago
"There are developers all across this planet that are absolutely incredible at what they do, serious geniuses and masters of the craft yet still barely earn enough to survive." Wouldn't it be a good idea to press for kids to be taught better business skills, then? I'm quite serious about this - the businesses I ran as a kid / teen were amongst my most important formative experiences.
motters 14y ago
What will the problems of the next generation be, and how do we prepare them for that? On the face of it the next few generations face huge issues. The only thing we know for certain is that the way we live now is totally unsustainable in the long run, and that new solutions will need to be found to old and unglamorous problems. More localised food production might be one way to help them through what looks like a turbulent few decades, by building in resilience to political and economic shocks. Is it still valuable to teach kids to code, in the same way that it might have been in the 1980s? I think so, and for the same reasons why growing your own food might also be a good idea. It makes you more independent and more resilient, and reduces your dependency upon increasingly centralised systems which are vulnerable to failure or being co-opted by parties who don't care about your interests. As time goes by code makes up the fundamental infrastructure of life, so who writes and controls that code, and what their priorities are, becomes a critical question.
- Turing_Machine 14y ago
  "The only thing we know for certain is that the way we live now is totally unsustainable in the long run" We "know" this how, exactly? Malthus was saying the same thing in 1798. Paul Ehrlich was saying the same thing in 1968. They were both dead wrong. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." "Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles...the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979...the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics."
  - wazoox 14y ago
    Malthus was exactly right, but he couldn't anticipate the coming industrial revolution and the explosion of energy availability through fossil fuels. There may be an equivalent revolution looming, but I can see no sign of it. For all purposes, Malthus could be right 200 years late. Most people seem to stick to "the system has worked for 350 years, so it must be able to go on indefinitely".
dschiptsov 14y ago
Yeah, coding (especially bad coding) is easy, and requires almost no knowledge, whereas programming is a completely different discipline, which requires a lot (really a lot) of knowledge, especially programming of systems. Programming begins with understanding of how computers work, what is an architecture, an instruction set, size of registers, etc. Look at that MIT Scheme source. They have macroses - 32bit word - well, use few bits as a tag, and rest as a value. 64 bit word - this for a tag part, this for value. This is an example of programming. When people "program" VMs - it is just coding. Piling up stuff without understanding. VMs were marketed for those who don't want to understand or even think. Ask those "programmers" to describe the behavior of the system in which their code supposed to work - I dunno, lol, JVM is the best VM, you know. Programming is about understanding how your data are represented, what are the access patterns, when memory is allocated, are there any mutations? concurrent access? how conflicts were resolved, if any, etc. It is about realizing that there is an OS, which manages your memory, switches contexts, does I/O, manages your stupid threads, and has another thousand processes running at the same time, sharing the same resources. Then, perhaps, programmer will think more about the data and access patterns, which is the essence of programming. It almost doesn't matter which language to use. Good programming has been done in C (nginx, Plan9, lisp kernels) and Lisp (Open Genera - the whole OS) etc. You can program using ideas form FP in assembly or C - there is no problem with that. The questions coders never asking is like why on earch a web-site must be represented as a huge hierarchy of objects inside a stupid VM, while it is bunch of files and some templating? Why to do simple map/reduce jobs we need hundreds megabytes of jars and gigabytes of memory, while the same task could be implemented more efficiently even in shell scripts? The answers, unfortunately, has nothing to do with programming. It is about making money by coders and managers.
- contingencies 14y ago
  Congratulations! You have turned a discussion of the relative merits of learning a critical and historic human discipline in to a rant against virtual machines (illogical, I might add: they are great tools for managing complexity) and the structure of programming organizations.
  - 14y ago
smogzer 14y ago
I divide my days into coding and planting seeds+farming, and i like very much both tasks. My opinion is that there is a bandwidth for everything, but kids should follow their passions and do what they love best. When i'll be a parent i'll teach them this because it's lovely, and that ! oh but this skill is amazing also ! There is bandwidth for most everything but above all your kids will copy you and see what you love and probably get inspired to follow their own path. So teach them to do what they love and love what they do ! and teach them to feel happy above all. But teach them by being that example yourself !
thejteam 14y ago
I think the real takeaway from this is good programmers code, great programmers solve problems. Writing computer code is the means to the end, not the end itself. So we need to learn something else to go along with it. It could be farming. It could be business or finance. It could be sports and fitness. Preferably different people will fall into different categories. The analogy isn't perfect, but think of learning to code in the classical education trivium. The grammar stage consists of learning languages and syntax and what different types of programs you can build. The logic stage is using that information to build working software. The rhetoric stage is learning what types of programs to build.
- randomdata 14y ago
  The problem with "great programmers solve problems" is that great programmers are often reluctant to solve problems that don't involve programming. Farming is interesting because you need to make use of all of the tools at your disposal (including programming, electronics, mechanics, etc.) to solve the problems of the farm – of which there are many! Students often have difficulty seeing the forest for the trees. The purpose of teaching coding may be to teach analytical skills, but the students will only see coding. Very few will know how to take those lessons and apply it to, say, a mechanical machine to automate their life. Great people solve problems – the tool they use doesn't matter. I do think learning to farm would go a long way to instil that in students.
  - contingencies 14y ago
    Hey randomdata, I really liked reading your posts on this thread and would be keen to chat by email. Mine's visible in my profile. Cheers.
bencevans 14y ago
Brilliant post! Props for the RHoK link too. I'm currently an A Level student in the UK that's been hacking on software and hardware projects for the last 6-7 years. I decided to go to the June RHoK event in Southampton and worked on a new project called WaterMe with 4 others that takes open satellite imagery from NASA and outputs an index of water content and foliage and more in the area over time from a user friendly interface. Also making available the data for researchers and hackers for other awesome projects. After the Hackathon we were accepted into a humanitarian incubator called GWOB (Geeks Without Bounds) which has put our team in contact with many spectacular personalities and guidance which has intorduced me into areas of mapping, open data, funding, advertising, additional technologies and even quad-copters/balloons/flying-machines. We are still developing the product (now closed source) and are hoping to look for investment in the near future to run the product at scale to provide for farmers, researchers and anyone interested in things such as drought and glaciers amongst others. Needless to say this has one of the best experiences of my life so far and is way more rewarding than any freelance work I've done as just make money jobs.
sounds 14y ago
Every once in a while I still recite this one poem shared with me back when I was quite impressionable; it's a fascinating comparison between farming and coding. For the record, I agree that our interaction with this biosphere (and hopefully, Mars soon) vastly outweighs the significance of github. No offense intended to github, just perspective. Part of it: Writing turns our deepest loam Planting roses with the words From indigenous tangle Visitors, though, not landlords
tomp 14y ago
The first thing I did: open Chrome Inspector and change text color to black.
nohuck13 14y ago
> The programming part is nothing more than a hammer to a builder or a scalpel to a surgeon. We need to remember that not all "tools" are equal. "Tools" like math, science, and philosophy provide leverage for future understanding/interacting with the world. The "tool" of farming provides the ability grow food efficiently. Important but not the same thing. The idea behind code.org and the like is that, hey, maybe programming is more foundational than it is just a trade for programmers to sit in cubicles and do all day. If you want to argue that programming and farming belong on the same plane, you need to argue that farming provides as much leverage as coding for general life tasks, or else why this leverage doesn't matter. Implying that programming is somehow a morally corrupt activity because of its "escapism" and links to advertising and high frequency trading feels a bit inadequate to me.
ihatehandles 14y ago
I'm surprised by the article really. For decades geeks have been mocked and ridiculed in society and the media. Fast forward to this last decade the wider world understands geeks and the geeks' work has made lives better (in some ways) for a lot of people. And now they are the criminals? There isn't a god-like status, the internet and blogs are built by nerds so yes they will have their praise there, much as you will see farmers being praised in Africa where i'm from. Geeks aren't even called geeks because 1. they are far apart 2. no one even understands what we do in the first place. We all almost know each other because there's so few of us Of course we need farmers, we need doctors, ventriloquists: we need all sorts of trades but when you find a different calling don't make yourself feel better by ridiculing other people's careers. Or maybe, just maybe, because tech is the hype where you are and in your media you feel other trades are being neglected. Whether that's true or not for WHERE YOU LIVE i don't know. I do understand your frustration with the code.org campaign though, which makes it seem like kids won't get identity documents because they can't code (lol). But for the rest of the world outside the valley? We actually need more coders.
deleted 14y ago
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pmelendez 14y ago
I still don't understand why people are so reluctant to teach kids code. Most of the argument I had read by now can be reduced to "not all people can be a programmer". While I am agree that programming as a career is not for everybody, be able to code is a valuable advantage in a lot of areas such as marketing, sales, physics, biology, chemistry, art, etc. I wonder if the same controversy was in place when people start recommending to teach math in schools, just because Math is not for everybody.
nnq 14y ago
> Growing food is far more challenging ...NOT!!! I know you Americans tend to see having a basic little vegetable garden as "black magic", but it's really something one can learn in under a week and based on this knowledge grow things to the point that one can actually produce enough for sale and maybe run a small business! But's you can't learn programming well enough to actually get any benefit out of it, let alone actually make a living from this alone, in a week! Yeah, I pick my food from the supermarket just like you, but I spent enough of my childhood at a farm know that things are really easy (at least if don't try running your little garden as a real business and get enough profit to cover marketing, distribution etc. - then shit gets really complicated), basically high-school biology is more than enough and everything can be found in any book or googled in minutes and you have tools that come with all the needed instructions and seed, herbicedes etc. It all boils to this funny observation: plants can grow by themselves, you just need to guide things a bit to get the desired outcome! otoh, computers don't program themselves, code doesn't write itself - you have to do it, and this is why it's hard and also fun and rewarding (for a comparison, starting to learn how to farm by writing the genetic code of the organism's you'll be farming - ok, it's and orders of magnitude exaggeration, but it's still the closest way farming could be alike to coding).
- cpressey 14y ago
  Since I've been trying to deconstruct "programmer" into "systems analyst" and "coder" in other comments, I might as well continue in that vein here, but with a slightly different tack: Farming is a lot more like "software engineering" than "programming". You can't pause a farm. It's an "engine" that you have to keep running, no matter what calamity occurs (weather, breakdowns, etc.)
  - nnq 14y ago
    indeed, but if your goal is not running it for profit but just producing tasty organic veggies from a hobby garden, then things mostly just work if you're in a temperate area with predictable climate. Just keep watering it and it will grow to the point of producing stuff, even if you totally mess up everything else. Software, on the other hand, rarely "just works"... nature and the "experience of evolution" are not on your side in the programming field...
edw519 14y ago
I don't think we should encourage anyone to do anything. We should discourage them. Let me explain... I take my example from this traditional practice of Rabbis: never accept a convert until they have been turned away twice before. Make them make 3 attempts to show their determination. Why? Because Judaism is hard. If they're not committed, they'll either give up or do just enough to satisify the minimum requirements, wasting everyone's time. Same thing with programming. Building real applications that deliver sustainable value over time is hard. It pretty much takes all that you've got and can take years to reach excellence. Every time I see another way to learn how to be a programmer (now that there's money in the game, they seem to be popping up everywhere), I have two immediate reactions: 1. How cool is that. I wish I had that years ago. 2. No! We had enough bad programmers who are doing it for all the wrong reasons. I believe the most important difference between an excellent programmer and everyone else is not intelligence, education, emotional state, or work ethic (although all of these help). The most important thing is a burning desire to build. Someone with this burning desire won't not need to be encouraged. You won't be able to stop them. Someone without it would be better off doing something else. We don't need more programmers. (Only IT execs who akin programmers to envelope stuffers think that.) We need more excellent programmers. The best way to get more excellent programmers? Discourage everyone so that only the most determined can make it. Our industry, our craft, and most of all, are code repositories would be much better off.
- prtamil 14y ago
  its true. thanks man.
- aroberge 14y ago
  And that's how you keep women away from computing. Yes, let's continue the practice that have lead our industry to lack diversity.
  - walkon 14y ago
    Are you implying that the drive and burning desire described by edw is something women are incapable of feeling towards programming? Or that they need extra hand holding and encouragement to be able to succeed in this field?
dlf 14y ago
The bit teaching kids to farm seems like a straw man regarding what is most important to learn. Learning to farm and learning to code are not mutually exclusive, and may even require overlapping skills (manipulating an environment with a given set of constraints to yield the most favorable results). Yet, the OP's conclusion presents a stronger argument for learning to code than learning to farm: "What code.org promotes is teaching kids how to look at problems, analyse them and present them in a way that captures what they are trying to solve. It promotes teaching kids how to use a new tool that can assist them to devise solutions to whatever problems they desire. Most importantly it promotes teaching them a tool that they can use to express and communicate this." This seems like an even stronger endorsement for learning to code than anything even in the code.org video. I think the real underlying sentiment in this post is to not learn to code for the wrong reasons, but kids don't care about future rewards like "vats of riches, shiny things and scantily clad women." They gravitate to things that are fun and that capture their attention in the here and now. Making a sprite spin in a circle in Scratch was all it took to get my 4 year old nephew's eyes to light up. He can decide one day whether he'd rather code for altruism or profit (again, not that they are mutually exclusive).
loup-vaillant 14y ago
> Programming is simply a tool, a way to abstract a problem and enable it to be solved or solved more efficiently. […] The programming part is nothing more than a hammer to a builder or a scalpel to a surgeon. That sounds like a massive understatement of the actual power of electronic computers. They are the universal mental tool. The tool that can do any sufficiently specified cognitive task. There is no such physical tool yet (though we could hope for Drexlerian nanotechnology). Programming is the way we control this tool. I do not know of any greater power.
jasonkostempski 14y ago
Teach kids everything.
matterhorn 14y ago
I'm a big fan of David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, and other economic knowledge.
chimpoutt 14y ago
lol at this bum's hopelessly orthogonal comment...
chimpoutt 14y ago
funny how the fairly obvious concept of resource scarcity, which probably underlies the father's post, goes unnoticed by most hn posters. i guess a natural affinity for technology and deep personal investment in learning to control it goes hand in hand with this insane whig mentality
lani 14y ago
>> Why are programmers granted such high status and wealth in our society for living in a self-created self-indulgent intellectual world of constant escapism We know the specifics of the answer to this, I'd like to answer this in a general sort of way - in Alvin Toffer's 'Third wave' way of looking at the world, the integrators in a division-of-labour system are its rulers. Programmers give you tools to integrate. Remember, the key themes of the the second wave are : "The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy." So you see , programmers are actually bureaucracy-engineers, creating the process and flow and channels for the industries of the world to play together
LAMike 14y ago
Why don't we teach kids how to code through farming? http://makeprojects.com/Project/Garduino+Geek+Gardening/62/1#.UTN9bet4bGA http://makeprojects.com/Project/Garduino+Geek+Gardening/62/1...
Bjorkbat 14y ago
Funny they should mention this, when I first went to college I majored in Horticulture, the idea being that I would one day be an organic farmer. Turns out that's a lousy way of learning the trade. They'll teach you a little bit of the hands-on stuff, but pretty soon it's all plant physiology. If you really wanted to learn, you had to go out and farm, not learn how the Krebs cycle works. So, after having worked as a farmhand for a few other farmers, I dropped out, tried share-farming for a while. Worked well, other than the fact that the drought in Texas was breaking records, which wasn't good if you're growing vegetables, not to mention the high-temps and a lack of a greenhouse. In 6 months I was pretty much done for. Still, I learned a lot, so much so that I figured I was probably smart enough to major in something more intellectually stimulating, so I went with engineering, found out I like programming a lot, and eventually settled in Computer Science. Long story short, I think he's onto something, farming isn't just physically demanding, it requires thought, especially if you don't want to use nasty chemicals. I may not be the best coder in the bunch, but I've found I can figure it out a little faster than classmates who brag that they learned their first language when they were in grade school. I learned my first language, C, when I was 21.
- mamoswined 14y ago
  Yeah I too went to ag school and then got into coding. It's pretty hard to be a farmer coming out of ag school unless your family has a farm already for you to run since the entry costs are so high. I still produce a lot of my own food via a family farm, but god I'm glad it's not my main job. I make a mistake when coding and things can be bad, but usually they are OK especially if you have revision control and a good workflow. I make a mistake farming and things die and I have nothing to eat or sell. Then there are just random inexplicable things that screw you over. Yes, this happens in IT, see what happened with Cloudflare this week, but imagine if that lasted for months, even years, and you could never switch providers- that's how badly weather can screw you over. I worked in academia IT for a bit and took archaeology classes for fun. It's no surprise that ancient farmer's bones have markers like pitting that indicate periods of severe malnutrition.
donniezazen 14y ago
Do not teach, create opportunities to learn.
martinced 14y ago
"The programming part is nothing more than a hammer to a builder or a scalpel to a surgeon. Yes, you need to know how to use it, but the skill involves knowing what to do with it." Oh but that is soooo wrong. By now it is an undisputed fact that robots are better at surgery than surgeons. Sure, surgeons are still in the loop, as of now... But by now software is already: controlling the machines extracting the material, controlling the milling machines, controlling the entire logistics infrastructure, controlling the robotic arm which shall hold the scalpel, add precision to the surgeon's movements, provide robotic arms with levels of freedom which no human hand shall ever made, etc. In addition to that software is also about data transmission for when surgeons need to perform remote surgery, about finding correlation between blood samples results and actual illness, finding tumors in scans, X-rays, etc. That ultra-reductive scalpel/surgeon is totally off. Soon the computer software shall be precisely the skilled expert. And of course one could go to great length explaining how software revolutionized farming too. But to me the less people understand anything about software, the more of a technopriests I'm going to be in tomorrow's world so I'm all for it ; )
nimblegorilla 14y ago
I'm surprised by the anti-intellectualism in that post. The idea that "Growing food is far more challenging, requires an order of magnitude more knowledge and continuous learning and dedication" is totally false. Growing food is "hard", but it's something most novices could easily do with only a little bit of preparation. It's very easy to grow food if you have access to outdoor space: 1. Buy seeds from hardware store 2. Plant seeds according to directions 3. Water seeds occasionally if there is a lack of rain 4. Wait a few months to harvest Plants and animals grew themselves for millions of years before farmers showed up.
rdouble 14y ago
The problem with this idea is that it's impossible to become a farmer unless you've already made enough money in software to quit and buy a farm.
pasbesoin 14y ago
Encourage -- allow and enable -- kids to participate in the real world around them, whether that's farming, or computer work, or whatever else. Shoving kids into artificial situations does everyone a disservice. P.S. Keep them safe, by all means -- reasonably safe, not to the point of disabling learning. But don't keep them ignorant, or perhaps worse, mis-informed.
russelluresti 14y ago
I think they're missing the point of the "learn to code" message. It's not to become extremely wealthy or have a higher status in life. Sure, having computer skills and finding a job is a nice benefit of learning to code, but the idea of learning to code comes from the fact that so much of the world now is built around code. Sites, communities, apps, etc are all built on code. Knowing how to code gives the ability to create and participate in the world.

140 points by kimburgess 14y ago

logn 14y ago

This article presents a nuanced point, and I agree with it. My response to this quote by Steve Burgess (not the author): "Why are programmers granted such high status and wealth in our society for living in a self-created self-indulgant intellectual world of constant escapism- and yet farmers are regarded with such distain when they operate on the most important boundary between society and the biosphere?" ... would have been: I disagree with your premise. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE (God Made a Farmer) and see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGJX6t3IAlk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGJX6t3IAlk (GoDaddy Bar Refaeli Super Bowl Commercial).

kriro 14y ago
Farmers have historically played with the fears of mankind and have lobbying power that rivals big tobacco in many countries. "More moneyz for the farmers or everyone will starve to death." They also tend to use somewhat stereotypical stuff depicting themselves as heroes that feed the homeland which just rubs me the wrong way. Add the "leave this farmland empty and make more money than actually farming on it" government handout abuse (+ all sorts of economic meddling that makes very little sense) and you pretty much get the mixture of why I don't grant farmers a high status by default. Big industry farming is also fairly disgusting. I'm not really an animal rights type of guy and more of the "whatever humans eat animals such is life" kind of school but what is happening in industry farming makes me pretty sick. [I'm obviously aggregating over all farmers here but by and large I wouldn't start out assuming a farmer was noble] Edit: that's obviously way off topic. My answer to the OP would be...teach kids to enjoy learning and exploring and not some specific craft. The rest will follow automatically. Programming as a craft works well because it tends to force you to learn and explore as a side effect (same for anything scientific really)
walshemj 14y ago
Given the amount of government subvention and subsidies compered to Farmers we are very very low down on the totem pole. In the EU in 20010 €43.8bn (31% of the EU budget) compared to the support that STEM industries get this is far more. Blue states like CA and MA support the smaller interior agricultural red states - the USA is set up to favor farmers. You don't get satire like Farmer Palmer in VIZ from nothimg
- gammarator 14y ago
  California has the most agricultural output of any state in the US, fyi: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/agricultural-productivity-in-the-us.aspx#28270 http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/agricultural-productiv...

wfunction 14y ago

"Why are [...] farmers are regarded with such distain [...]?" They are? I haven't seen people feel that way, so I'm kind of surprised to read this. Some references to evidence that supports this claim might be useful.

adamnemecek 14y ago
Same with "Why are programmers granted such high status...". I was not aware that programmers had a particularly high social status.
- Turing_Machine 14y ago
  http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/28/leadership-careers-jobs-cx_tvr_0728admired.html http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/28/leadership-careers-jobs-cx_... Farmer and engineer are about the same, with farmer having a slight edge.
  - jasonlotito 14y ago
    Engineer, not programmer. Judging by the picture, I'm pretty sure they aren't referring to the computer "engineer."
    - wfunction 14y ago
      Software engineer?

PeterisP 14y ago

The big point is actually that currently we (as in, the whole world) have far more farmers than we need (especially in the developing countries) and less coders than we need. And in the future, automation and coders will ensure that we will need even less farmers. How much population do we really need to tend all global arable land using modern methods machinery? Currently in developed countries it's somewhere near 2%, depending on the local crops used; in time it may be 1% as more and more things can now be done by machines. Countries such as India and China currently have hundreds of millions of farmers; but the same result can be produced by half or less people with farming methods currently used in USA/EU. Right now a lot of modern grain farm work consists of driving equipment around all your fields - and self-driving tractors will eliminate even that remainder "manual" work.

randomdata 14y ago
Driving the equipment around is the fun part, but not the real work that goes into the business. Farming is actually quite challenging. A recent problem I remember having on my farm: Soil is full of wet lumps of clay, unsuitable for planting, cultivators are not breaking them up and you have a few day window to fix the problem before it gets too late into the season to plant the crop. What do you do? I actually agree that the point is to attract more programmers into the industry, but the consequences of that seem dangerous. What happens when we have too many programmers? Should coding classes be dropped from the system?
- XorNot 14y ago
  Coding practice scales. Farming does not. If you have a smartphone, you have (potentially) a programming platform. We can't simply give everyone on the planet a few acres of farmland to get to grips with the challenges of farming.
  - cpressey 14y ago
    I dunno. There are vast patches of ocean that are going pretty much unused right now. (Yes, I know that's still science-fiction, but is it really that much more of a stretch than the AI/robot/automation "software will eat the world" firm-belief that you see daily on HN?)

raverbashing 14y ago

Yes, farming is hard, very hard Most here don't appreciate how hard it is (especially if you're inexperienced) Do people still grow beans using a cotton in a cup? Do they still teach that at schools? That's basically the 'hello world' of farming Of course, depends on what you are doing, type of plants, inside a greenhouse or in an open field, the scale of it etc. Not to mention raising animals. That's very hard as well It's unsurprising that it's getting ever more 'industry like'. You take a lot of people and specialize in only a few crops, so you can have profits that work out. Machines are expensive, fertilizer, soil analysis, etc, etc And then there's a climate issue, too much rain, too cold, too warm and you miss the mark.

ivanmilles 14y ago
>That's basically the 'hello world' of farming This is an extremely fascinating perspective. I need to go... build something. Wow.
vollmarj 14y ago
You are absolutely correct. I grew up on a farm and I'm now building FarmLogs because of how tough farming can be. Maybe introducing better technology into the farm can blend both programming and farming.
contingencies 14y ago
The selection of cotton is an interesting one, for if the product were edible the children might get the idea they didn't need to work for money.

singular 14y ago

"This thing #{X} that I am inexperienced at is much harder than this thing #{Y} I spent years doing because I am experienced at #{Y} and have some idea how to do it and thus it feels comfortable. Why, I am going to go so far as to talk down everybody who still does #{Y}, partly because I'm somewhat burnt out on it, and partly because my comparative experience makes me feel like it's easy compared to #{X}." Where:- * X, Y are very broad fields in which there is a whole range of tasks which span from the very simple to the insanely difficult, * X, Y both revolutionised the world at different points in human history, X before Y.

coldtea 14y ago
X indeed revolutionised the world. Y just made porn delivery and commerce better. It's not even clear at this point if it had any effect (besides negative) to the global intellectual climate.
- patrickaljord 14y ago
  Ok, this is a real low for HN. Are you actually saying that the only thing computing has done for the world is better porn delivery and better commerce? Wow. Do you have any idea how we managed to decode our genome so fast? Any idea that every science labs including maths have computers to test their hypothesis and solve their equations at such a huge scale and speed no human being could possibly dream to match? How about communication? How about almost anything you use today to make your life easier has a computer chip in it? How about making the bulk of human knowledge available to anyone with an internet connection even in remote poor areas of the world where adults can barely read such as Peru where I lived for years? I could go on but I think you get the idea.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >Ok, this is a real low for HN. Are you actually saying that the only thing computing has done for the world is better porn delivery and better commerce? Wow. Do you have any idea how we managed to decode our genome so fast? Any idea that every science labs including maths have computers to test their hypothesis and solve their equations at such a huge scale and speed no human being could possibly dream to match? How about communication? How about almost anything you use today to make your life easier has a computer chip in it? Making my life slightly easier is not that important -- and hardly what I'd call a world changing event in the scale of agricultural revolution or even the industrial revolution. I understand that as CS people we like to sing our own praises, but just like once you have electric ovens, getting a microwave is not that big of progress (if it's not a throwback to a worse method of heating), similarly, once you have global trade routes, ships, trains, cars, snail mail, telegraphs and telephones, having computerised version of communication is not that much of a step forward. The world is not that different, including everyday life, from 40 years ago, when computers were mostly unknown outside of large companies. We just play more videogames, watch more cat videos, and exchange more (than zero) BS instant messages and mails. Quantitative is not qualitative difference. As for the use of computers in science: again, quantitative is not qualitative difference. The most involved and mind-boggling discoveries were done before computers, from evolution, to relativity, to quantum mechanics, to the DNA. We are now better at number crunching (such as decoding the genome), that doesn't mean we produce science of equal impact.

guard-of-terra 14y ago

In competitive environments, low-tech occupations tend to lose as a group. Take any mass farming. Tea collectors, for example, I believe they're paid so little they are in constant poverty. Why are they paid that way? They collect all the tea people around the world drink. Paying them the increase of the cost of a tea bag by 1 cent will make them comparatively rich. Why isn't it done? They have no bargaining power. Anyone can collect tea badly enough, this is true for most agricultural labour. It is physically hard but you can teach it in half an our. So they can always be easily replaced either with local population or with some illegal immigrants. In the developed world, a lot of people just pass documents around and make phone calls. It's the sophistication of zooplankton and physically much less demanding than agricultural jobs, but you can't quite teach it to anyone in the world in half an hour - you need locals for this (they connect to other people and need to fit culturally) and they need some even very basic skills. So they get paid with actual money you can buy things with. Take coders. Training a coder is not easy and it even requires some aptitude. Thus, even mediocre coders can often command their rules to their employers. And great coders are true citizens of the world, employable anywhere on their terms. So, to make farming cool we have to make it high-tech. Another problem is that farming doesn't seem very profitable even on the large / capital scale, because the barrier to entry is so low.

randomdata 14y ago
> Another problem is that farming doesn't seem very profitable even on the large / capital scale, because the barrier to entry is so low. For what it is worth, I make considerably more money per hour farming than I do programming, and I get paid quite well to be a programmer. With farming, however, the barrier to entry is actually quite high. That barrier being access to capital. It is the massive debt any normal person has to take on to even think about farming that cripples most. Programmers are quite lucky that you only need one reasonably affordable tool, which almost everyone already owns, and you are eligible to enter the market.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  That's because you're a high-tech farmer, aren't you? Profits - capital = slim margins. If you have some "free" capital then you're lucky.

aangjie 14y ago

> but it is far far more important that all human beings >learn to interact with the natural environment and >understand the basics of food, water and shelter.” This part is my biggest take away from the post. that learn to interact with the natural environment and figure out how to create(nay, refactor/engineer/discover a better word here??) food/water/shelter from it is a hard,important and makes for a more interesting* educational goal than solving math problems or puzzles. *-- I said interesting, but i would bet that it's probably better in terms of creating a (net total) productive society(x years of education later) Disclaimer: I hadn't heard of code.org before now and i live in India.

gambiting 14y ago

I don't understand. We've spent thousands of years, using 99.9% of able-bodied people for farming, hunting or some other food-gathering activities. Only selected few could afford to NOT work in farming. Even America, just 200 years ago had 90% of its population working as farmers. Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Sure, the food industry is not always honest,not always as good as your own home-grown food, but still - it allowed us to do something else with our lives, and pushed our societies an order of magnitude ahead. As much as people should APPRECIATE farming, I don't think that everyone should do it. We produce enough food as it is. We should teach kids how to code however, not because we need more programmers(which we do,but I digress) - but because it's the easiest way to introduce kids to logical, technical-like thinking. That way we can have more mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, engineers - people who we can afford to keep alive(almost literally) because they do not need to grown their own food anymore! They can sit at their desks for the whole day, thinking how to make the world better, instead of looking at how the crops grow. I would say - why not give kids both? Is it too much to ask? Show them how vegetables are grown, how animals are cared for and how are they slaughtered, but at the same time, yes, please teach them how to code.

barry-cotter 14y ago
Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Look at me exercising a form of conspicuous consumption (the time of a highly educated profeasional) that my class and culture peers think are praiseworthy. Let me say everyone should indulge in my hobby. Let's look down on those who don't together.
- meaty 14y ago
  Actually some of us do it as a context switch and a tie to our roots. Some of us, myself included consider it to be a valuable skill in an unstable world and some insurance against the fuckwits we have to trust in society. Also the stuff tastes better.
fsniper 14y ago
I don't believe computer programing is a good way to teach logical thinking. Sociology, Philosophy and Literature are better alternatives. Coding only makes you better micro managers, "thinking of efficient ways to make idiots do things you like". Also teaching agriculture or other physical goods producing craftsmanship to kids would make them better at real world challenges. Modern society seems to be run by digital arts but it's just an illusion of how we live.

infoman 14y ago

because robots will farm for us

empoman 14y ago

I think what most people are missing is that it's not about creating more programmers as much as it is about teaching people how to think analytically. When you're programming you try to solve a high level problem using low level techniques. The actual programming is the part where you find a solution for the high level problem with your low level tools. So again, it is not just about writing code. It is about how to approach problems and finding viable solutions, no matter what the form of the problem is. It could as well be: "How can I speed up the harvesting on my farm?". Knowing programming helps us in many more situations than just writing code.

kimburgess 14y ago
Exactly.
cpressey 14y ago
I agree with your point. But to riff off dschiptsov's comment, how do you define "programming" (as opposed to, say, "coding"), and how does knowing programming help you answer questions like "How can I speed up harvesting on my farm?" I would call the ability to understand and solve those kinds of problems analysis, not programming. It used to be the case that "systems analyst" and "programmer" were two different job titles; at this point, they've largely merged, but I still see them as two different skill sets. (And then there's "software engineer" which is a whole other can of worms.)
- empoman 14y ago
  That's a fair question, so I'll try to explain how I see it. Problem analysis as you mentioning it, to me, seems like the theoretical form of programming. So here I see "coding", or programming, as an easy way to practice problem analysis in a real context, and not just by going through a text book like we do with math in school. And I agree with you regarding programmers and system analysts. There are so many titles and job descriptions nowadays that try to look fancier than the other just to make it easier arguing for a higher salary. Even if what they do is basically the same. Here in Sweden, there is a long running "joke"-ish alternative title for a cleaner, and that is "hygiene technician". One sounds fancier than the other, but it really isn't. Regarding how speeding up the harvesting would be done, I have no idea since I am not at all familiar with how a farm works. The point I was trying to make is that if you have knowledge about the domain of farming, AND you know how to program (or if you are good at problem analysis, which I think you are if you can program), then I'm sure that it would be easier to think of something than if you weren't. Does it make sense or am I just rambling like a crazy person? :D

Nux 14y ago

There's enough farming. We should teach kids how not to waste the food.

XorNot 14y ago
It really doesn't matter - most of the food is not wasted by individuals, it's thrown away by corporations. There's a reason corn-products are in almost literally everything...

thenomad 14y ago

"There are developers all across this planet that are absolutely incredible at what they do, serious geniuses and masters of the craft yet still barely earn enough to survive." Wouldn't it be a good idea to press for kids to be taught better business skills, then? I'm quite serious about this - the businesses I ran as a kid / teen were amongst my most important formative experiences.

motters 14y ago

What will the problems of the next generation be, and how do we prepare them for that? On the face of it the next few generations face huge issues. The only thing we know for certain is that the way we live now is totally unsustainable in the long run, and that new solutions will need to be found to old and unglamorous problems. More localised food production might be one way to help them through what looks like a turbulent few decades, by building in resilience to political and economic shocks. Is it still valuable to teach kids to code, in the same way that it might have been in the 1980s? I think so, and for the same reasons why growing your own food might also be a good idea. It makes you more independent and more resilient, and reduces your dependency upon increasingly centralised systems which are vulnerable to failure or being co-opted by parties who don't care about your interests. As time goes by code makes up the fundamental infrastructure of life, so who writes and controls that code, and what their priorities are, becomes a critical question.

Turing_Machine 14y ago
"The only thing we know for certain is that the way we live now is totally unsustainable in the long run" We "know" this how, exactly? Malthus was saying the same thing in 1798. Paul Ehrlich was saying the same thing in 1968. They were both dead wrong. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." "Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles...the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979...the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics."
- wazoox 14y ago
  Malthus was exactly right, but he couldn't anticipate the coming industrial revolution and the explosion of energy availability through fossil fuels. There may be an equivalent revolution looming, but I can see no sign of it. For all purposes, Malthus could be right 200 years late. Most people seem to stick to "the system has worked for 350 years, so it must be able to go on indefinitely".

dschiptsov 14y ago

Yeah, coding (especially bad coding) is easy, and requires almost no knowledge, whereas programming is a completely different discipline, which requires a lot (really a lot) of knowledge, especially programming of systems. Programming begins with understanding of how computers work, what is an architecture, an instruction set, size of registers, etc. Look at that MIT Scheme source. They have macroses - 32bit word - well, use few bits as a tag, and rest as a value. 64 bit word - this for a tag part, this for value. This is an example of programming. When people "program" VMs - it is just coding. Piling up stuff without understanding. VMs were marketed for those who don't want to understand or even think. Ask those "programmers" to describe the behavior of the system in which their code supposed to work - I dunno, lol, JVM is the best VM, you know. Programming is about understanding how your data are represented, what are the access patterns, when memory is allocated, are there any mutations? concurrent access? how conflicts were resolved, if any, etc. It is about realizing that there is an OS, which manages your memory, switches contexts, does I/O, manages your stupid threads, and has another thousand processes running at the same time, sharing the same resources. Then, perhaps, programmer will think more about the data and access patterns, which is the essence of programming. It almost doesn't matter which language to use. Good programming has been done in C (nginx, Plan9, lisp kernels) and Lisp (Open Genera - the whole OS) etc. You can program using ideas form FP in assembly or C - there is no problem with that. The questions coders never asking is like why on earch a web-site must be represented as a huge hierarchy of objects inside a stupid VM, while it is bunch of files and some templating? Why to do simple map/reduce jobs we need hundreds megabytes of jars and gigabytes of memory, while the same task could be implemented more efficiently even in shell scripts? The answers, unfortunately, has nothing to do with programming. It is about making money by coders and managers.

contingencies 14y ago
Congratulations! You have turned a discussion of the relative merits of learning a critical and historic human discipline in to a rant against virtual machines (illogical, I might add: they are great tools for managing complexity) and the structure of programming organizations.
- 14y ago

smogzer 14y ago

I divide my days into coding and planting seeds+farming, and i like very much both tasks. My opinion is that there is a bandwidth for everything, but kids should follow their passions and do what they love best. When i'll be a parent i'll teach them this because it's lovely, and that ! oh but this skill is amazing also ! There is bandwidth for most everything but above all your kids will copy you and see what you love and probably get inspired to follow their own path. So teach them to do what they love and love what they do ! and teach them to feel happy above all. But teach them by being that example yourself !

thejteam 14y ago

I think the real takeaway from this is good programmers code, great programmers solve problems. Writing computer code is the means to the end, not the end itself. So we need to learn something else to go along with it. It could be farming. It could be business or finance. It could be sports and fitness. Preferably different people will fall into different categories. The analogy isn't perfect, but think of learning to code in the classical education trivium. The grammar stage consists of learning languages and syntax and what different types of programs you can build. The logic stage is using that information to build working software. The rhetoric stage is learning what types of programs to build.

randomdata 14y ago
The problem with "great programmers solve problems" is that great programmers are often reluctant to solve problems that don't involve programming. Farming is interesting because you need to make use of all of the tools at your disposal (including programming, electronics, mechanics, etc.) to solve the problems of the farm – of which there are many! Students often have difficulty seeing the forest for the trees. The purpose of teaching coding may be to teach analytical skills, but the students will only see coding. Very few will know how to take those lessons and apply it to, say, a mechanical machine to automate their life. Great people solve problems – the tool they use doesn't matter. I do think learning to farm would go a long way to instil that in students.
- contingencies 14y ago
  Hey randomdata, I really liked reading your posts on this thread and would be keen to chat by email. Mine's visible in my profile. Cheers.

bencevans 14y ago

Brilliant post! Props for the RHoK link too. I'm currently an A Level student in the UK that's been hacking on software and hardware projects for the last 6-7 years. I decided to go to the June RHoK event in Southampton and worked on a new project called WaterMe with 4 others that takes open satellite imagery from NASA and outputs an index of water content and foliage and more in the area over time from a user friendly interface. Also making available the data for researchers and hackers for other awesome projects. After the Hackathon we were accepted into a humanitarian incubator called GWOB (Geeks Without Bounds) which has put our team in contact with many spectacular personalities and guidance which has intorduced me into areas of mapping, open data, funding, advertising, additional technologies and even quad-copters/balloons/flying-machines. We are still developing the product (now closed source) and are hoping to look for investment in the near future to run the product at scale to provide for farmers, researchers and anyone interested in things such as drought and glaciers amongst others. Needless to say this has one of the best experiences of my life so far and is way more rewarding than any freelance work I've done as just make money jobs.

sounds 14y ago

Every once in a while I still recite this one poem shared with me back when I was quite impressionable; it's a fascinating comparison between farming and coding. For the record, I agree that our interaction with this biosphere (and hopefully, Mars soon) vastly outweighs the significance of github. No offense intended to github, just perspective. Part of it: Writing turns our deepest loam Planting roses with the words From indigenous tangle Visitors, though, not landlords

tomp 14y ago

The first thing I did: open Chrome Inspector and change text color to black.

nohuck13 14y ago

> The programming part is nothing more than a hammer to a builder or a scalpel to a surgeon. We need to remember that not all "tools" are equal. "Tools" like math, science, and philosophy provide leverage for future understanding/interacting with the world. The "tool" of farming provides the ability grow food efficiently. Important but not the same thing. The idea behind code.org and the like is that, hey, maybe programming is more foundational than it is just a trade for programmers to sit in cubicles and do all day. If you want to argue that programming and farming belong on the same plane, you need to argue that farming provides as much leverage as coding for general life tasks, or else why this leverage doesn't matter. Implying that programming is somehow a morally corrupt activity because of its "escapism" and links to advertising and high frequency trading feels a bit inadequate to me.

ihatehandles 14y ago

I'm surprised by the article really. For decades geeks have been mocked and ridiculed in society and the media. Fast forward to this last decade the wider world understands geeks and the geeks' work has made lives better (in some ways) for a lot of people. And now they are the criminals? There isn't a god-like status, the internet and blogs are built by nerds so yes they will have their praise there, much as you will see farmers being praised in Africa where i'm from. Geeks aren't even called geeks because 1. they are far apart 2. no one even understands what we do in the first place. We all almost know each other because there's so few of us Of course we need farmers, we need doctors, ventriloquists: we need all sorts of trades but when you find a different calling don't make yourself feel better by ridiculing other people's careers. Or maybe, just maybe, because tech is the hype where you are and in your media you feel other trades are being neglected. Whether that's true or not for WHERE YOU LIVE i don't know. I do understand your frustration with the code.org campaign though, which makes it seem like kids won't get identity documents because they can't code (lol). But for the rest of the world outside the valley? We actually need more coders.

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pmelendez 14y ago

I still don't understand why people are so reluctant to teach kids code. Most of the argument I had read by now can be reduced to "not all people can be a programmer". While I am agree that programming as a career is not for everybody, be able to code is a valuable advantage in a lot of areas such as marketing, sales, physics, biology, chemistry, art, etc. I wonder if the same controversy was in place when people start recommending to teach math in schools, just because Math is not for everybody.

nnq 14y ago

> Growing food is far more challenging ...NOT!!! I know you Americans tend to see having a basic little vegetable garden as "black magic", but it's really something one can learn in under a week and based on this knowledge grow things to the point that one can actually produce enough for sale and maybe run a small business! But's you can't learn programming well enough to actually get any benefit out of it, let alone actually make a living from this alone, in a week! Yeah, I pick my food from the supermarket just like you, but I spent enough of my childhood at a farm know that things are really easy (at least if don't try running your little garden as a real business and get enough profit to cover marketing, distribution etc. - then shit gets really complicated), basically high-school biology is more than enough and everything can be found in any book or googled in minutes and you have tools that come with all the needed instructions and seed, herbicedes etc. It all boils to this funny observation: plants can grow by themselves, you just need to guide things a bit to get the desired outcome! otoh, computers don't program themselves, code doesn't write itself - you have to do it, and this is why it's hard and also fun and rewarding (for a comparison, starting to learn how to farm by writing the genetic code of the organism's you'll be farming - ok, it's and orders of magnitude exaggeration, but it's still the closest way farming could be alike to coding).

cpressey 14y ago
Since I've been trying to deconstruct "programmer" into "systems analyst" and "coder" in other comments, I might as well continue in that vein here, but with a slightly different tack: Farming is a lot more like "software engineering" than "programming". You can't pause a farm. It's an "engine" that you have to keep running, no matter what calamity occurs (weather, breakdowns, etc.)
- nnq 14y ago
  indeed, but if your goal is not running it for profit but just producing tasty organic veggies from a hobby garden, then things mostly just work if you're in a temperate area with predictable climate. Just keep watering it and it will grow to the point of producing stuff, even if you totally mess up everything else. Software, on the other hand, rarely "just works"... nature and the "experience of evolution" are not on your side in the programming field...

edw519 14y ago

I don't think we should encourage anyone to do anything. We should discourage them. Let me explain... I take my example from this traditional practice of Rabbis: never accept a convert until they have been turned away twice before. Make them make 3 attempts to show their determination. Why? Because Judaism is hard. If they're not committed, they'll either give up or do just enough to satisify the minimum requirements, wasting everyone's time. Same thing with programming. Building real applications that deliver sustainable value over time is hard. It pretty much takes all that you've got and can take years to reach excellence. Every time I see another way to learn how to be a programmer (now that there's money in the game, they seem to be popping up everywhere), I have two immediate reactions: 1. How cool is that. I wish I had that years ago. 2. No! We had enough bad programmers who are doing it for all the wrong reasons. I believe the most important difference between an excellent programmer and everyone else is not intelligence, education, emotional state, or work ethic (although all of these help). The most important thing is a burning desire to build. Someone with this burning desire won't not need to be encouraged. You won't be able to stop them. Someone without it would be better off doing something else. We don't need more programmers. (Only IT execs who akin programmers to envelope stuffers think that.) We need more excellent programmers. The best way to get more excellent programmers? Discourage everyone so that only the most determined can make it. Our industry, our craft, and most of all, are code repositories would be much better off.

prtamil 14y ago
its true. thanks man.
aroberge 14y ago
And that's how you keep women away from computing. Yes, let's continue the practice that have lead our industry to lack diversity.
- walkon 14y ago
  Are you implying that the drive and burning desire described by edw is something women are incapable of feeling towards programming? Or that they need extra hand holding and encouragement to be able to succeed in this field?

dlf 14y ago

The bit teaching kids to farm seems like a straw man regarding what is most important to learn. Learning to farm and learning to code are not mutually exclusive, and may even require overlapping skills (manipulating an environment with a given set of constraints to yield the most favorable results). Yet, the OP's conclusion presents a stronger argument for learning to code than learning to farm: "What code.org promotes is teaching kids how to look at problems, analyse them and present them in a way that captures what they are trying to solve. It promotes teaching kids how to use a new tool that can assist them to devise solutions to whatever problems they desire. Most importantly it promotes teaching them a tool that they can use to express and communicate this." This seems like an even stronger endorsement for learning to code than anything even in the code.org video. I think the real underlying sentiment in this post is to not learn to code for the wrong reasons, but kids don't care about future rewards like "vats of riches, shiny things and scantily clad women." They gravitate to things that are fun and that capture their attention in the here and now. Making a sprite spin in a circle in Scratch was all it took to get my 4 year old nephew's eyes to light up. He can decide one day whether he'd rather code for altruism or profit (again, not that they are mutually exclusive).

loup-vaillant 14y ago

> Programming is simply a tool, a way to abstract a problem and enable it to be solved or solved more efficiently. […] The programming part is nothing more than a hammer to a builder or a scalpel to a surgeon. That sounds like a massive understatement of the actual power of electronic computers. They are the universal mental tool. The tool that can do any sufficiently specified cognitive task. There is no such physical tool yet (though we could hope for Drexlerian nanotechnology). Programming is the way we control this tool. I do not know of any greater power.

jasonkostempski 14y ago

Teach kids everything.

matterhorn 14y ago

I'm a big fan of David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, and other economic knowledge.

chimpoutt 14y ago

lol at this bum's hopelessly orthogonal comment...

chimpoutt 14y ago

funny how the fairly obvious concept of resource scarcity, which probably underlies the father's post, goes unnoticed by most hn posters. i guess a natural affinity for technology and deep personal investment in learning to control it goes hand in hand with this insane whig mentality

lani 14y ago

>> Why are programmers granted such high status and wealth in our society for living in a self-created self-indulgent intellectual world of constant escapism We know the specifics of the answer to this, I'd like to answer this in a general sort of way - in Alvin Toffer's 'Third wave' way of looking at the world, the integrators in a division-of-labour system are its rulers. Programmers give you tools to integrate. Remember, the key themes of the the second wave are : "The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy." So you see , programmers are actually bureaucracy-engineers, creating the process and flow and channels for the industries of the world to play together

LAMike 14y ago

Why don't we teach kids how to code through farming? http://makeprojects.com/Project/Garduino+Geek+Gardening/62/1#.UTN9bet4bGA http://makeprojects.com/Project/Garduino+Geek+Gardening/62/1...

Bjorkbat 14y ago

Funny they should mention this, when I first went to college I majored in Horticulture, the idea being that I would one day be an organic farmer. Turns out that's a lousy way of learning the trade. They'll teach you a little bit of the hands-on stuff, but pretty soon it's all plant physiology. If you really wanted to learn, you had to go out and farm, not learn how the Krebs cycle works. So, after having worked as a farmhand for a few other farmers, I dropped out, tried share-farming for a while. Worked well, other than the fact that the drought in Texas was breaking records, which wasn't good if you're growing vegetables, not to mention the high-temps and a lack of a greenhouse. In 6 months I was pretty much done for. Still, I learned a lot, so much so that I figured I was probably smart enough to major in something more intellectually stimulating, so I went with engineering, found out I like programming a lot, and eventually settled in Computer Science. Long story short, I think he's onto something, farming isn't just physically demanding, it requires thought, especially if you don't want to use nasty chemicals. I may not be the best coder in the bunch, but I've found I can figure it out a little faster than classmates who brag that they learned their first language when they were in grade school. I learned my first language, C, when I was 21.

mamoswined 14y ago
Yeah I too went to ag school and then got into coding. It's pretty hard to be a farmer coming out of ag school unless your family has a farm already for you to run since the entry costs are so high. I still produce a lot of my own food via a family farm, but god I'm glad it's not my main job. I make a mistake when coding and things can be bad, but usually they are OK especially if you have revision control and a good workflow. I make a mistake farming and things die and I have nothing to eat or sell. Then there are just random inexplicable things that screw you over. Yes, this happens in IT, see what happened with Cloudflare this week, but imagine if that lasted for months, even years, and you could never switch providers- that's how badly weather can screw you over. I worked in academia IT for a bit and took archaeology classes for fun. It's no surprise that ancient farmer's bones have markers like pitting that indicate periods of severe malnutrition.

donniezazen 14y ago

Do not teach, create opportunities to learn.

martinced 14y ago

"The programming part is nothing more than a hammer to a builder or a scalpel to a surgeon. Yes, you need to know how to use it, but the skill involves knowing what to do with it." Oh but that is soooo wrong. By now it is an undisputed fact that robots are better at surgery than surgeons. Sure, surgeons are still in the loop, as of now... But by now software is already: controlling the machines extracting the material, controlling the milling machines, controlling the entire logistics infrastructure, controlling the robotic arm which shall hold the scalpel, add precision to the surgeon's movements, provide robotic arms with levels of freedom which no human hand shall ever made, etc. In addition to that software is also about data transmission for when surgeons need to perform remote surgery, about finding correlation between blood samples results and actual illness, finding tumors in scans, X-rays, etc. That ultra-reductive scalpel/surgeon is totally off. Soon the computer software shall be precisely the skilled expert. And of course one could go to great length explaining how software revolutionized farming too. But to me the less people understand anything about software, the more of a technopriests I'm going to be in tomorrow's world so I'm all for it ; )

nimblegorilla 14y ago

I'm surprised by the anti-intellectualism in that post. The idea that "Growing food is far more challenging, requires an order of magnitude more knowledge and continuous learning and dedication" is totally false. Growing food is "hard", but it's something most novices could easily do with only a little bit of preparation. It's very easy to grow food if you have access to outdoor space: 1. Buy seeds from hardware store 2. Plant seeds according to directions 3. Water seeds occasionally if there is a lack of rain 4. Wait a few months to harvest Plants and animals grew themselves for millions of years before farmers showed up.

rdouble 14y ago

The problem with this idea is that it's impossible to become a farmer unless you've already made enough money in software to quit and buy a farm.

pasbesoin 14y ago

Encourage -- allow and enable -- kids to participate in the real world around them, whether that's farming, or computer work, or whatever else. Shoving kids into artificial situations does everyone a disservice. P.S. Keep them safe, by all means -- reasonably safe, not to the point of disabling learning. But don't keep them ignorant, or perhaps worse, mis-informed.

russelluresti 14y ago

I think they're missing the point of the "learn to code" message. It's not to become extremely wealthy or have a higher status in life. Sure, having computer skills and finding a job is a nice benefit of learning to code, but the idea of learning to code comes from the fact that so much of the world now is built around code. Sites, communities, apps, etc are all built on code. Knowing how to code gives the ability to create and participate in the world.