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Personally I find the contemporary "learn to code movement" to be asinine for several reasons: 1) It supports affirmative action and seeks to set sex quotas. (

Personally I find the contemporary "learn to code movement" to be asinine for several reasons: 1) It supports affirmative action and seeks to set sex quotas. (http://slashdot.org/story/13/11/24/187255/codeorg-more-money-for-cs-instructors-who-teach-more-girls http://slashdot.org/story/13/11/24/187255/codeorg-more-money...) 2) It offers a very sugar-coated and frankly nauseating view of "coding". It adulates this mysterious and powerful essence dubbed only as "code" and is highly biased towards the imperative paradigm. Notice how they rarely use the word "programming", but rather it's always "code". This signifies that they value parroting instructions more over actual understanding. 3) The testimonials by all sorts of celebrities are simply ridiculous and laughable. So many actors, musicians, sports players, politicians and business moguls, but barely any actual computer scientists. 4) The way they present their entire campaign, and considering who backs it, leads me to believe that their motive is not to foster computer science education, so much as to teach people just enough skills to be a 9-to-5 code monkey that can write instructions in Java or some $EnterpriseLanguage. Cheap, disposable labor. 5) Absolutely no focus on software freedom and ethics, of course. 6) Another possible outcome is that by making computer science (rather merely coding in this case) a mandatory subject, they'll end up alienating many kids from it. This depends on the aptitude of the educators, but it's safe to assume it won't be too good. 7) This is arguable, but merely learning to code basic programs doesn't really offer too much insight into the complex process that is software development. The educational value in writing Ruby (used here as an example), while not void, is not that great by itself. Programming languages and natural languages have this thing in common: they're different. Ruby isn't Haskell.

beambot 13y ago
Wow, that was a lot of strawman arguments. (1) The OP's title calls for every American. (2) "Code" is pretty agnostic as far as paradigms. Many people would be served just fine by learning how to do basic computation, graphing, and scripting in Excel. (3) These folks are not computer scientists, but they don't need to be to advocate tech literacy. (4) It's about life skills (esp. tech literacy) -- more like Thoreau-style self reliance rather than becoming a disposable cog. (5) Cart before the horse... (6) You mean like math, science, reading, and writing? (7) Learning to code basic programs helps you accomplish real tasks. Insight into "software development" be damned. I drive a car, but I'm not a ICE thermodynamics expert.

beambot 13y ago

Wow, that was a lot of strawman arguments. (1) The OP's title calls for every American. (2) "Code" is pretty agnostic as far as paradigms. Many people would be served just fine by learning how to do basic computation, graphing, and scripting in Excel. (3) These folks are not computer scientists, but they don't need to be to advocate tech literacy. (4) It's about life skills (esp. tech literacy) -- more like Thoreau-style self reliance rather than becoming a disposable cog. (5) Cart before the horse... (6) You mean like math, science, reading, and writing? (7) Learning to code basic programs helps you accomplish real tasks. Insight into "software development" be damned. I drive a car, but I'm not a ICE thermodynamics expert.