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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

The clear message of the article is about increasing awareness of users' limitations, but I'm also wondering what can be done to increase people's computer literacy. When we see statistics about functional illiteracy in the traditional print sense, we might think about ways of minimizing demands for people to read things, but we might also wonder how we can help improve literacy.

So, believing in the analogy between print literacy and computer literacy, I want to ask that question here too. What helps or doesn't help, and what can change? How early would different interventions have to start to be helpful?

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In my kids UK primary school ICT (Info & Comp. Tech) amounts to playing games, not even computing focused ones just crappy flash games.

It's like teaching literacy by giving them only picture books. They'd be able to handle books, turn the pages, etc., just not actually use them properly.

With games like lightbot, apps like turtles and Scratch, and sites like code.org I can't really see the excuse for this.

At the very list give them dosbox and make them enable extended memory.

Your comment caught me off guard and made me laugh out loud.

There were so many things about those early systems which were not universal skills at all, but simply hardware limitations (or holdovers from previous hardware limitations - or just terrible design).

And yet, after watching my kid learning to use a computer, I do feel a deep nostalgia for the single-purpose simplicity of the command line I grew up with.

The clear message of the article is about increasing awareness of users' limitations, but I'm also wondering what can be done to increase people's computer literacy.

I think those are two sides of the same coin - if we understand the user better we can make software that's easier for them to use, which in turn makes the user more confident and better at using the software. The goal shouldn't be to take away the powerful tools and replace them with simplified tools, but to make the learning curve shallower so users can learn to use the software and eventually to the point where they can use complex features if they need to.

Agreed. But I think advanced users become comfortable with idiosyncratic aspects of computing that could be recognised as deficiencies, and improved. So as well as teaching, there's the matter of raising the standards of software quality.

An opinion stated to a community that (generally speaking) thinks that Git is a pretty good piece of software.

Snarky, I'm sorry, but you're 100% right. I grew up in a world where there was tons of optimism in software development. Programs like HyperCard, FileMaker, Microsoft Access, Visual Basic/WinForms, RealBasic, etc. promised to make (the most common type of) application development accessible to everybody with minimal training.

HyperCard's most successful developers didn't come from software development backgrounds-- they were artists, journalists, historians, etc.

(See this excellent article: http://www.filfre.net/2016/10/the-manhole/ )

All that's abandoned now. The optimism is gone. Developers who gave a crap seemed to have disappeared a decade ago. The open source development methodology, who never gave a crap about ease-of-use even when Apple and Microsoft used it as the foundation of their products, have taken over all software development.

And I sit at my cubicle, thinking about the now-dead world that was emerging back in the mid-90s, thinking: I could have been a plumber instead.

Maybe there's hope for a new generation to come to be educated with those old values. And it doesn't need to be an entire generation... just enough people in the right places.

I didn't grow up in that age. Thanks for the link!

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