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You're living in a pretty isolated world, my friend. I'd say 90% of my friends would be the audience for this. I've been coding 20 years, most of my friends are

You're living in a pretty isolated world, my friend. I'd say 90% of my friends would be the audience for this. I've been coding 20 years, most of my friends are successful, grad-degree educated people in a variety of fields, and some of them are even my coworkers. Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's education system? Or maybe the companies who make all their money from code? I think not- it wouldn't help the economic position of Apple, Google, FB, or Microsoft if everyone knew what code is and how it works. It strengthens the tech economy's stranglehold on society when code is treated as something inscrutable. So there's really very few resources for people- even educated, successful, technically literate folk- to grok "what is code?" Many coders would do well to read a similar article, if there was one, called, "What is Society?"

stormbrew 11y ago
> Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's education system? Grade school teachers aren't expected to be specialists in the field they teach. They're expected to be specialists in teaching. Usually they have a bachelors (or masters) in education and maybe another degree, but it may or may not be the thing they teach (if they even teach only one thing at all). To put it another way, this is a bit like asking what physicists would willingly teach in the USA's education system? The answer is obviously not very many, but that's beside the point. Physics still gets taught.
- GuiA 11y ago
  > Grade school teachers aren't expected to be specialists in the field they teach. They're expected to be specialists in teaching. Yeah, and this breaks down pretty fast, particularly when it comes to teaching the stuff you can't easily hand wave, e.g. science. Even at the middle/high school level, where teachers are supposed to have studied topic they teach at the undergraduate level in some capacity, you find plenty of foreign language teachers who are terrible speakers of the language they teach, or math teachers who basically have the same level of math as their students, with the distinction that they have access to the answers for the exercises they give. I spent some time in a US state university for grad school, and the level of some students who majored in education and later went on to teach was abysmal. It's hard to tell if the hegemony of standardized testing is the root or a symptom of the problem, but the overall picture is bleak. This is precisely why if we want a great education system, we need to incentivize people who are practicing professionals first to then go teach. My best teachers in high school all shared those traits: a historian who had spent many years doing field research teaching history/geography, a geologist who was also a researcher for a major lab teaching natural sciences, etc. Not everyone is made for teaching, but we as a society need to become much better at encouraging and enabling the people who enjoy it to teach in parallel to their professional activity (I would happily teach math from 8-10am before my day job 2-3 days a week if there was the structure for it.). The people who want to become teachers just because they like kids but don't have any deep knowledge/understanding of any particular subject can teach kindergarten.
- buckbova 11y ago
  Exactly, I did my first instructed programming in a 6th grade computer class in BASIC on Apple IIes. I think my teach at the time taught typing as well.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  This is incidentally a weakness in the US education system. You split schools into elementary-middle-high (for no especial reason) then treat it all as 'grade school'. In every European country I've lived in schools are generally split into primary and secondary. Primary school teachers are general educators whose primary skill is teaching but who do not need advanced knowledge in any particular subject. They usually have the same class all day, which gives them a deep insight into students' progrewss (although from a kid's point of view, if you don't get on with your teacher then school may suck). In secondary school teachers may teach more than one subject but they're required to have studied their primary subject at university and done some additional study in other subjects they teach, as well as additional study in educational methods. So your math teacher has a math degree, your history teacher a history degree and so on. People who plan to teach usually develop themselves academically in two subjects, sometimes three if they're closely related or you have special experience. For example: http://www.teachingcouncil.ie/_fileupload/Registration/General_and_Special_Requirements_for_Degree_Recognition_June2011%2053901607.pdf http://www.teachingcouncil.ie/_fileupload/Registration/Gener... California seems to be moving towards this model too: http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/leaflets/cl560c.pdf http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/leaflets/cl560c.pdf The downside of this is that if a particular teacher is sick and another has to take the class as a substitute, the substitute teacher just babysits, or comes into class with a homework assignment from the sick teacher that should be doable during the class period. The upside is that in general students are keenly aware that teachers know what they're talking about and are considerably more expert in the subject than would be possible using the assigned textbooks. I've ranted on HN before about how destructive of educational ends the practice of using 'Teacher's Editions of textbooks with scripts and answer keys is. It degrades teaching to a branch of bullshit artistry, and students who take a subject seriously can quickly detect a lack of true expertise. Obviously this short comment isn't meant as an accurate descriptor of the whole state of the US education system, just the legacy of the non-specialization referred to in the grandparent comment.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    > You split schools into elementary-middle-high (for no especial reason) then treat it all as 'grade school'. As someone who went to school in the US, no, you're wrong.
yongelee 11y ago
What do you mean? Theres tons, TONS of resources for learning the basics of programming.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Yes, but a lot of them go through the same hoops - Hello World, variables, conditionals, loops, arrays, functions, OK that's it take this pile of building materials and just turn it into a house mmkay. There are two big problems for would-be programmers: there's a shortage of obvious standards on architecture/program sturcture (not least because it's hard to prove mathematically which structures are optimal), and endlessly proliferating options. For example, betweeen HTML 5, CSS, and JS, it's quite complex to put together a web page these days. I mean look at this page on the DOM: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Object_Model https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Ob... there are hundreds of subtopics, and it's not obvious which ones are most important. The Introductory page on the DOM is less-then-inviting to a non-programmer, not least because it presumes code as the optimal medium for production, when most people would rather work through a GUI and have the computer take care of the abstractions. I wish sometimes that programmers were forced to decompose their latest and greatest algorithms into electronic circuit diagrams or diagrams or something, to remind them that translating functionality between different paradigms is a Hard Problem and that ,amy people do not like all the typing and syntactical overhead of text-based programming.
  - JetSpiegel 11y ago
    That page on DOM is the reference Manual. Do you complain that Gray's Anatomy is just too thick, how do you navigate all that info to find what pill should you take?
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      We're talking about how it presents to novice programmers.
- nightski 11y ago
eropple 11y ago
> Many coders would do well to read a similar article, if there was one, called, "What is Society?" There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. I feel you here a whole bunch.
- maratd 11y ago
  > There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. It is absolutely unreasonable. The average person has no clue who the vice president happens to be ... so why should software developers? We can complain about how clueless average people are, sure, but there's no reason to apply a higher standard to software developers.
  - badkitten 11y ago
    Of course there is. Software developers (in general) are smarter and have had better educations than "average" people. Most smart, educated people I know can name the vice president of the United States, and I don't even live in the US. I think it's completely unreasonable for someone not to know who the vice president of the country they live in is.
    - monknomo 11y ago
      The corner office in the earlier example depends on the software being written to make money. If the software is bad, they will make less money. By and large, knowing the vice president's name will not cause any appreciable dip or rise in how much money a company makes. So, in the context of 'why is it important for business people who's livelihoods partially depend on code to know what code is?' not knowing what programmers do is worse than not knowing the vice president's name
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - shard 11y ago
ht_th 11y ago
I think that Parent made the observation that it is sad that in our information society people (in responsible positions (regarding ICT)) don't know about the fundamentals of the information society. At least, that's what I took from it and I concur. We, as a society, should have started integrating computational thinking (Wing, 2006) as a core competency in the k-12 curriculum from the late 1980s onwards. We didn't. anecdote In 1991, I was in 5th grade, I saw the first computer enter the classroom in my primary school. It wasn't used but for some remedial mathematics training for a students or two and I believe the teacher did a computer course with it. In 2010 I became a high school computer science teacher. There were three computer rooms (about 30 computers each) for the whole school (of about 1500 students) running windows XP + IE 6. Besides my class, the computer rooms were mostly used for making reports and "searching for information". Some departments did have specialized software installed (most of which came with the text books), but used it sparingly at best. On top of that, these software was mostly simple, inflexible, mostly non-interactive, non-collaborative, and "pre-fab" instructional materials. Often this software was not much more than a "digitized" version of parts of the text book with some animations, games, and procedural trainers mixed in.
- cwt 11y ago
  anecdote: I graduated in 2008 from HS. When I graduated from there the most advanced computer class offered was essentially how to open up photoshop, word, and excel. A little bit of this is adobe flash go have fun. And make a pure html web page with inline styles - no css. Now that HS has a 3d printer. Once, the computer teacher sincerely asked me how to make a href open in a new window. I graduated college in 2012 and I learned what css was and why it was better. I took an intro to java class. Learned some stuff volunteering for NPOs doing website work. When I graduated I knew I wanted to do something in IT but not program. Now I am a software dev. Turns out its easy to get a job and teach yourself how to code when nobody understands what coding is.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
  Another anecdote. In 2015 my teenager will start High School in a small, rural, school district and each student has a Chromebook. No, I don't know what they will be used for besides googling information, but times are changing. I emphasized small and rural for a reason.
xanderjanz 11y ago
You make a good, if harsh point. But this: "it wouldn't help the economic position of Apple, Google, FB, or Microsoft if everyone knew what code is and how it works. It strengthens the tech economy's stranglehold on society when code is treated as something inscrutable." Is just cynical. Tech companies aren't so fragile as to depend on general ignorance among the human population. If more people understood code, these companies could create more code. I think you point to an underlying misconception that some how technology is just a barrier to entry, and doesn't provide intrinsic value. But I do not believe this to be true.
mbell 11y ago
> Who is supposed to teach people what code is? 'But no one told me I needed to know this' stops being an excuse as of adulthood, if not earlier. Anyone who cares what coding is only needs curiosity and an internet connection, the web is full of introductory material for almost every level from almost every angle. If a professional in the current world doesn't know 'what coding is', they just don't care.

stormbrew 11y ago

> Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's education system? Grade school teachers aren't expected to be specialists in the field they teach. They're expected to be specialists in teaching. Usually they have a bachelors (or masters) in education and maybe another degree, but it may or may not be the thing they teach (if they even teach only one thing at all). To put it another way, this is a bit like asking what physicists would willingly teach in the USA's education system? The answer is obviously not very many, but that's beside the point. Physics still gets taught.

GuiA 11y ago
> Grade school teachers aren't expected to be specialists in the field they teach. They're expected to be specialists in teaching. Yeah, and this breaks down pretty fast, particularly when it comes to teaching the stuff you can't easily hand wave, e.g. science. Even at the middle/high school level, where teachers are supposed to have studied topic they teach at the undergraduate level in some capacity, you find plenty of foreign language teachers who are terrible speakers of the language they teach, or math teachers who basically have the same level of math as their students, with the distinction that they have access to the answers for the exercises they give. I spent some time in a US state university for grad school, and the level of some students who majored in education and later went on to teach was abysmal. It's hard to tell if the hegemony of standardized testing is the root or a symptom of the problem, but the overall picture is bleak. This is precisely why if we want a great education system, we need to incentivize people who are practicing professionals first to then go teach. My best teachers in high school all shared those traits: a historian who had spent many years doing field research teaching history/geography, a geologist who was also a researcher for a major lab teaching natural sciences, etc. Not everyone is made for teaching, but we as a society need to become much better at encouraging and enabling the people who enjoy it to teach in parallel to their professional activity (I would happily teach math from 8-10am before my day job 2-3 days a week if there was the structure for it.). The people who want to become teachers just because they like kids but don't have any deep knowledge/understanding of any particular subject can teach kindergarten.
buckbova 11y ago
Exactly, I did my first instructed programming in a 6th grade computer class in BASIC on Apple IIes. I think my teach at the time taught typing as well.
anigbrowl 11y ago
This is incidentally a weakness in the US education system. You split schools into elementary-middle-high (for no especial reason) then treat it all as 'grade school'. In every European country I've lived in schools are generally split into primary and secondary. Primary school teachers are general educators whose primary skill is teaching but who do not need advanced knowledge in any particular subject. They usually have the same class all day, which gives them a deep insight into students' progrewss (although from a kid's point of view, if you don't get on with your teacher then school may suck). In secondary school teachers may teach more than one subject but they're required to have studied their primary subject at university and done some additional study in other subjects they teach, as well as additional study in educational methods. So your math teacher has a math degree, your history teacher a history degree and so on. People who plan to teach usually develop themselves academically in two subjects, sometimes three if they're closely related or you have special experience. For example: http://www.teachingcouncil.ie/_fileupload/Registration/General_and_Special_Requirements_for_Degree_Recognition_June2011%2053901607.pdf http://www.teachingcouncil.ie/_fileupload/Registration/Gener... California seems to be moving towards this model too: http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/leaflets/cl560c.pdf http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/leaflets/cl560c.pdf The downside of this is that if a particular teacher is sick and another has to take the class as a substitute, the substitute teacher just babysits, or comes into class with a homework assignment from the sick teacher that should be doable during the class period. The upside is that in general students are keenly aware that teachers know what they're talking about and are considerably more expert in the subject than would be possible using the assigned textbooks. I've ranted on HN before about how destructive of educational ends the practice of using 'Teacher's Editions of textbooks with scripts and answer keys is. It degrades teaching to a branch of bullshit artistry, and students who take a subject seriously can quickly detect a lack of true expertise. Obviously this short comment isn't meant as an accurate descriptor of the whole state of the US education system, just the legacy of the non-specialization referred to in the grandparent comment.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  > You split schools into elementary-middle-high (for no especial reason) then treat it all as 'grade school'. As someone who went to school in the US, no, you're wrong.

yongelee 11y ago

What do you mean? Theres tons, TONS of resources for learning the basics of programming.

anigbrowl 11y ago
Yes, but a lot of them go through the same hoops - Hello World, variables, conditionals, loops, arrays, functions, OK that's it take this pile of building materials and just turn it into a house mmkay. There are two big problems for would-be programmers: there's a shortage of obvious standards on architecture/program sturcture (not least because it's hard to prove mathematically which structures are optimal), and endlessly proliferating options. For example, betweeen HTML 5, CSS, and JS, it's quite complex to put together a web page these days. I mean look at this page on the DOM: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Object_Model https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Ob... there are hundreds of subtopics, and it's not obvious which ones are most important. The Introductory page on the DOM is less-then-inviting to a non-programmer, not least because it presumes code as the optimal medium for production, when most people would rather work through a GUI and have the computer take care of the abstractions. I wish sometimes that programmers were forced to decompose their latest and greatest algorithms into electronic circuit diagrams or diagrams or something, to remind them that translating functionality between different paradigms is a Hard Problem and that ,amy people do not like all the typing and syntactical overhead of text-based programming.
- JetSpiegel 11y ago
  That page on DOM is the reference Manual. Do you complain that Gray's Anatomy is just too thick, how do you navigate all that info to find what pill should you take?
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    We're talking about how it presents to novice programmers.
nightski 11y ago

eropple 11y ago

> Many coders would do well to read a similar article, if there was one, called, "What is Society?" There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. I feel you here a whole bunch.

maratd 11y ago
> There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. It is absolutely unreasonable. The average person has no clue who the vice president happens to be ... so why should software developers? We can complain about how clueless average people are, sure, but there's no reason to apply a higher standard to software developers.
- badkitten 11y ago
  Of course there is. Software developers (in general) are smarter and have had better educations than "average" people. Most smart, educated people I know can name the vice president of the United States, and I don't even live in the US. I think it's completely unreasonable for someone not to know who the vice president of the country they live in is.
  - monknomo 11y ago
    The corner office in the earlier example depends on the software being written to make money. If the software is bad, they will make less money. By and large, knowing the vice president's name will not cause any appreciable dip or rise in how much money a company makes. So, in the context of 'why is it important for business people who's livelihoods partially depend on code to know what code is?' not knowing what programmers do is worse than not knowing the vice president's name
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - shard 11y ago

ht_th 11y ago

I think that Parent made the observation that it is sad that in our information society people (in responsible positions (regarding ICT)) don't know about the fundamentals of the information society. At least, that's what I took from it and I concur. We, as a society, should have started integrating computational thinking (Wing, 2006) as a core competency in the k-12 curriculum from the late 1980s onwards. We didn't. anecdote In 1991, I was in 5th grade, I saw the first computer enter the classroom in my primary school. It wasn't used but for some remedial mathematics training for a students or two and I believe the teacher did a computer course with it. In 2010 I became a high school computer science teacher. There were three computer rooms (about 30 computers each) for the whole school (of about 1500 students) running windows XP + IE 6. Besides my class, the computer rooms were mostly used for making reports and "searching for information". Some departments did have specialized software installed (most of which came with the text books), but used it sparingly at best. On top of that, these software was mostly simple, inflexible, mostly non-interactive, non-collaborative, and "pre-fab" instructional materials. Often this software was not much more than a "digitized" version of parts of the text book with some animations, games, and procedural trainers mixed in.

cwt 11y ago
anecdote: I graduated in 2008 from HS. When I graduated from there the most advanced computer class offered was essentially how to open up photoshop, word, and excel. A little bit of this is adobe flash go have fun. And make a pure html web page with inline styles - no css. Now that HS has a 3d printer. Once, the computer teacher sincerely asked me how to make a href open in a new window. I graduated college in 2012 and I learned what css was and why it was better. I took an intro to java class. Learned some stuff volunteering for NPOs doing website work. When I graduated I knew I wanted to do something in IT but not program. Now I am a software dev. Turns out its easy to get a job and teach yourself how to code when nobody understands what coding is.
HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
Another anecdote. In 2015 my teenager will start High School in a small, rural, school district and each student has a Chromebook. No, I don't know what they will be used for besides googling information, but times are changing. I emphasized small and rural for a reason.

xanderjanz 11y ago

You make a good, if harsh point. But this: "it wouldn't help the economic position of Apple, Google, FB, or Microsoft if everyone knew what code is and how it works. It strengthens the tech economy's stranglehold on society when code is treated as something inscrutable." Is just cynical. Tech companies aren't so fragile as to depend on general ignorance among the human population. If more people understood code, these companies could create more code. I think you point to an underlying misconception that some how technology is just a barrier to entry, and doesn't provide intrinsic value. But I do not believe this to be true.

mbell 11y ago

> Who is supposed to teach people what code is? 'But no one told me I needed to know this' stops being an excuse as of adulthood, if not earlier. Anyone who cares what coding is only needs curiosity and an internet connection, the web is full of introductory material for almost every level from almost every angle. If a professional in the current world doesn't know 'what coding is', they just don't care.