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I actually mention the magic of LISP and Smalltalk environments - they do greatly add in the exploratory creation process. But my "coding as literacy" strawman
by ibdknox 12y ago
I actually mention the magic of LISP and Smalltalk environments - they do greatly add in the exploratory creation process. But my "coding as literacy" strawman is born out by the industry: http://code.org/ http://code.org/ and http://www.codecademy.com/ http://www.codecademy.com/ are great examples. By saying you can learn to code by following through some online lessons that teach you how to write some Javascript, we're doing people a great disservice.
Moreover, my real argument is that I don't think coding should be literacy. From the fundamental disconnect section:
> We don't want a generation of people forced to care about Unicode and UI toolkits. We want a generation of writers, biologists, and accountants that can leverage computers.
I don't think people should have to worry about exactly what the computer is doing if their problem isn't related to it. Specifically teaching general purpose programming as we think of it now is largely teaching people to build apps or command line tools. Instead of a generation that thinks of that as computing, we need a generation of people curing cancer with it.
- gavinpc 12y agoChris, as someone who respects you and your work, I'm interested to know how you would describe the "movement" aspect of coding-as-literacy. That's where I began to smell a strawman (even if not intentional). Follow the money: what is coding-as-literacy but a government-supported effort to bring down the price of software developers, disguised as a public service campaign? That in itself is a strawman, yet I suspect that in talking about a "movement" we've taken for granted that leaders within the field (such as Alan Kay), and not just celebrities are advocating for this. Do you know of any?
- endergen 12y agoThere is a strong 'movement' towards pushing this concept for sure. See code.org pushed by Zuckerberg, and even used and promoted by the President: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/10/president-obama-first-president-write-line-code http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/10/president-obama-fi...