Matt Mullenweg: Scripting is the new literacy | Hacker News Reader

Matt Mullenweg: Scripting is the new literacy

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37 pointsptbello9 comments

And 95% of the linked article isn't about scripting. There's just a single paragraph buried in the middle. And the ability to program isn't the singular ultimate skill in the possible tool kit for success.

I agree. And he's talking -to- 'young programmers' and not everyone. Of course they need to be able to script.

I find it exciting that there are others who have also realized that programming skills are going to be as necessary to success today as reading and writing have been for the past few centuries.

I had the same epiphany last year and wrote about it along with what I thought it would lead to:

http://www.yacoset.com/Home/the-future-of-it

Yes, I'm boasting that "I thought of it first", but I have a feeling that maybe I haven't.

Because new necessary skills come along all the time. If you can't drive a car today, for example, you're severely disadvantaged. Or the ability to type more than 20 wpm, or coordinate your thumbs with what a character/cursor does on a screen, or comprehend cause-and-effect once you throw computers and the Internet into the mix.

In another couple of decades there'll be a new skill that everyone has to learn, or else resign to flipping burgers. I, for one, am looking forward to it.

Not the burger flipping part, tho.

The most elegant proponent of this idea is Douglas Rushkoff, his latest book being "Program or Be Programmed."

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Program-Be-Programmed-Commands-Digital...

Does he mean 'scripting' is something different than 'programming'? I don't see the difference. And why doesn't he just call it programming then? Because that's what it is.

I'm willing to believe that WordPress was written through a process of 'scripting' and doesn't count as programming.

I feel like programming has more forethought into the design and architecture of the system. This is what developers are trained to do.

However, many of my peers at uni who are scientists, economists and linguists have picked up on domain-specific languages (MATLAB, R, etc) and are capable of writing one-off scripts to solve their problems. These people are "scripting".

I don't know what he exactly meant, but there are certainly several shades of that, like there are (sometimes, obscure and subtle) differences between the meanings¹ of "bashing some lines together", "coding", "programming", "software engineering" and "computer science research".

"Scripting" feels like a relatively small coding task, to automate (frequently, to prevent repetitive routine work) of operating some complex software system by quickly defining high-level behavior required to preform the job. But this "definition" is vague, could be applied to "non-scripting" as well, and, moreover, I somehow doubt there could be any precise definition what "scripting" is.

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1) I'm not a native English speaker, so this is just how I perceive things.

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