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I'm skeptical. Reading & writing is a skill necessary enough in modern society that illiteracy is practically crippling. I imagine an illiterate would have to a

I'm skeptical. Reading & writing is a skill necessary enough in modern society that illiteracy is practically crippling. I imagine an illiterate would have to ask someone else to read to them every half-hour at best. E.g. "I'm trying to google 'how to tie a necktie', how do I spell 'necktie'?" My intuition says basic programming-literacy by contrast is (while a powerful skill) unnecessary for the average Joe's quotidian life. He might frequently need GUI's, but he won't need to understand the guts. Can you come up a situation that programming could accomplish in a way that a well-designed GUI couldn't? If anything should become the new literacy, I'd expect it to be discrete math based on its generality and source of analogies.

groby_b 12y ago
You presuppose there'll always be a GUI. That's similar to the assumption that I don't need reading skills since there'll always be an audio version. True for many cases, but the more you approach one-off, the more you'll find there is no audio version. Or no GUI. The question is, are there examples where the cost of acquiring and applying the skill is worth the savings? In individual instances, doubtful. Done habitually, probably - the case for reading is fairly well established. The case for computational literacy might be hampered by the very spotty availability of data. Once you can obtain data sets, it definitely becomes worth it. Silly overprivileged example: When I was looking for a place to live, I was evaluating the location to choose based on a heat map generated from 20+ different metrics. As a result, I found a place that * Was well below what you usually pay * Was pretty unique for the area I'm in * Makes me happy every day * Only cost me a 15 minute increase in commute time. (This is L.A., so consider that an achievement of epic proportions ;) Was that one instance worth spending time learning how to work with computers? No. But it's one single neat payoff. And if the data hadn't required custom scrapers, it would've required only minutes of my time.
- Double_Cast 12y ago
  Correction: I presuppose there'll always be a GUI for the cases where the average Joe has a show-stopping problem frequent enough to warrant someone else to build a GUI solution. Literacy is needed because (a) people need it on a daily-basis at least and (b) it's a meta-skill since it's impractical for people to learn other subjects without it. Contrast literacy with programming. I don't expect that programming will be as frequent or spontaneous except in a future where either (a) brain emulations exist or (b) citizens interface with reality exclusively through emacs. Nor do I consider programming a meta-skill in the sense that refusing to learn it will impede you from accessing every other area of human knowledge. (But I'm glad you're enjoying L.A.)
Retra 12y ago
It's not relevant in day-to-day living, but neither is reading for the most part. You can just watch TV and still keep up with the culture. However, if you are trying to be productive, you need to read. And knowing how to program is an advantage, too. In my personal experience, programming makes it far easier to model problems in other areas. Also: having an understanding of Topology, Linguistics, and Physics make it far easier to reason about computers. I find mathematicians who can't program to be generally slow and uselessly strict and programmers who can't think in mathematical abstractions to be terrible. (They tend to see their problems narrowly, unaware that the problem may be already solved in a more general form -- but they can't read the literature, and the culture says "writing code is more important than reading theory." No wonder they keep reimplementing the same ideas over and over again...) > Can you come up a situation that programming could accomplish in a way that a well-designed GUI couldn't? There's a problem here: by saying "well designed", you protect yourself from being wrong just by moving the goal posts. A command line is a 'well designed GUI', except nobody thinks of it that way, because it would make GUI a meaningless term. What do you mean by 'well designed' if not 'fit for its purpose?'

groby_b 12y ago

You presuppose there'll always be a GUI. That's similar to the assumption that I don't need reading skills since there'll always be an audio version. True for many cases, but the more you approach one-off, the more you'll find there is no audio version. Or no GUI. The question is, are there examples where the cost of acquiring and applying the skill is worth the savings? In individual instances, doubtful. Done habitually, probably - the case for reading is fairly well established. The case for computational literacy might be hampered by the very spotty availability of data. Once you can obtain data sets, it definitely becomes worth it. Silly overprivileged example: When I was looking for a place to live, I was evaluating the location to choose based on a heat map generated from 20+ different metrics. As a result, I found a place that * Was well below what you usually pay * Was pretty unique for the area I'm in * Makes me happy every day * Only cost me a 15 minute increase in commute time. (This is L.A., so consider that an achievement of epic proportions ;) Was that one instance worth spending time learning how to work with computers? No. But it's one single neat payoff. And if the data hadn't required custom scrapers, it would've required only minutes of my time.

Double_Cast 12y ago
Correction: I presuppose there'll always be a GUI for the cases where the average Joe has a show-stopping problem frequent enough to warrant someone else to build a GUI solution. Literacy is needed because (a) people need it on a daily-basis at least and (b) it's a meta-skill since it's impractical for people to learn other subjects without it. Contrast literacy with programming. I don't expect that programming will be as frequent or spontaneous except in a future where either (a) brain emulations exist or (b) citizens interface with reality exclusively through emacs. Nor do I consider programming a meta-skill in the sense that refusing to learn it will impede you from accessing every other area of human knowledge. (But I'm glad you're enjoying L.A.)

Retra 12y ago

It's not relevant in day-to-day living, but neither is reading for the most part. You can just watch TV and still keep up with the culture. However, if you are trying to be productive, you need to read. And knowing how to program is an advantage, too. In my personal experience, programming makes it far easier to model problems in other areas. Also: having an understanding of Topology, Linguistics, and Physics make it far easier to reason about computers. I find mathematicians who can't program to be generally slow and uselessly strict and programmers who can't think in mathematical abstractions to be terrible. (They tend to see their problems narrowly, unaware that the problem may be already solved in a more general form -- but they can't read the literature, and the culture says "writing code is more important than reading theory." No wonder they keep reimplementing the same ideas over and over again...) > Can you come up a situation that programming could accomplish in a way that a well-designed GUI couldn't? There's a problem here: by saying "well designed", you protect yourself from being wrong just by moving the goal posts. A command line is a 'well designed GUI', except nobody thinks of it that way, because it would make GUI a meaningless term. What do you mean by 'well designed' if not 'fit for its purpose?'