Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

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Those are vastly different things. Computer programming is a necessary skill for a small number of technical positions in software development, data analysis, and research, a tiny percentage of the jobs in the economy. Even at a midsize SAAS company, 30% or more of the positions don't require programming. Teaching computer science to every single kid because a tiny percentage will need programming for their job would be ridiculous, just like it would be ridiculous to teach every kid history because writing research papers is a "necessary skill for the jobs of the future." You can, however, make a reasonable argument that kids should be exposed to powerful ways of thinking that shape their world, and that learning concrete skills (writing a program, writing a research paper, solving equations) is a good way to familiarize kids with new ways of thinking. The arguments are only similar in that they both claim that studying a topic in school will have some benefit later. That isn't a high degree of similarity in the context of asking what students should study in school.

My wife came home today and said her work load had just doubled. She's been told to copy reports from Word to a web based application. I told her that this could be scripted really easily. She shrugged. Imagine the efficiencies possible in normal jobs if everyone knew of the possibility of automation, even if they weren't able to do it themselves.

Well, if it's a one off task, it would probably be more efficient for the non coding human to just do it, rather than realise this is something someone else could automate this one time. Bearing in mind that we don't live in a perfect world and the data would more than likely need a "human touch" in terms of applying intelligent actions to malformed/missing data (even more so if the data isn't in a structured format)

In all reality, it would just be yet another thing that could be automated but it probably isn't financially worth it. The 'x' human effort in this one time task is probably not worth the '3x' human effort to get someone who can code familiar with the data and then be on hand to answer any non obvious questions.

Course, mileage may vary depending on exact data(size, quality etc)

I'm not sure I agree. Knowing programming specifically -- how computers work, and how to write scripts to control them and automate your workflow -- rarely does not have a positive impact on your productivity at work and your aptitude in understanding the world around you. Computational thinking is important as well, but you can't discount the practical angle here.

Oh, sure, I agree with you on that. I'm just contrasting the actual stated purposes of such programs with the author's strawman version of them.

A century ago, the same argument was made for teaching Latin in elementary school.

I teach my elementary school age children about the Latin and Greek roots of the words we use to give them a better understanding of things.

I won't know how effective my instruction is until they're much older but it's my belief that having a deeper understanding of the words we use has a positive effect on one's thinking.

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