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Comment by chrisaycock | Hacker News Reader

Given the ever-increasing amount of automation in the economy, I believe that programming (of one form or another) is going to become a skill as important as writing. Everyone learns how to write in school, even though only a few become novelists or journalists. Similarly, everyone will learn to code even though only a few will become data scientists or software engineers.

Programming for non-professionals looks a lot more like Excel than Python. I imagine the trend will continue where deceptively simple interfaces allow people to automate routine tasks. Those interfaces might get more expressive languages, but most programs will be at most a dozen lines long.

That's the kind of language I think we should start with. We can worry about more detailed CS topics for the students who actually specialize in that.

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I’m bearish on the long-fabled ‘citizen programmer.’ This is a concept that’s been long discussed in the legal tech world, and it just won’t happen, not here, and not yet. Non-technical people, largely, don’t want to make things work, they want to tell other people to make things work. They have the raw intelligence to do it, but don’t want to do it, and don’t want to be convinced to apply themselves to learn how to do it. It’s just a cultural gulf that I think tech-minded folks can’t wrap their heads around.

It has been a pipe dream of some since the 1960s that "everybody" would program computers in the future. It hasn't happened and won't happen. Most people simply don't have the patience for it.

I'm sure a century or two the same was said for reading and writing.

Yeah, but:

> In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy, and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

Plus stuff like this:

https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/true-we-have-42-functional-...

And keep in mind Romania is average at a world level, economically, maybe even slightly higher than average.

On top of that programming is based on logic (for the layman who doesn't want to think of it as based on math; and let's not go into the layman's clear separation between logic and math), so it for sure has an extra difficulty level compared to reading or writing.

100% population literacy is neither reasonable nor attainable. Yet, functional literacy has drastically improved throughout the past century.

To say programming is never to attain such a characteristic is making a statement against the trends of history in all other academic disciplines. Focusing on the present state is an ignorance of underlying trend.

A couple thousand years ago, groundbreaking advances in trigonometry were made by some of the worlds smartest people. Today the average high schooler knows soh cah toa.

Well, I agree with what you're saying.

But if these advances take centuries, from a purely personal perspective they don't matter much. By then, I, and everyone I have and will ever know, will be dead.

In the long term, we're all dead.

Though I obviously appreciate progress :-)

It is amazing that no one has pointed out JavaScript in this thread. The vast number of people who can come into programming by way of a free web browser with a built-in debugger is astonishing. It is incredible to think of the zero-cost (!) development environment that is Microsoft Visual Studio Code plus Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox (run+debug). I could have never imagined it twenty years ago, and I am not a JavaScript fan-gurl/-boi.

And what about coding boot camps? Again, they have put umpteen more people to work as programmers. (Are they more than universities yet?) Again, you don't have to love them, but they are lowering the bar and helping more people gain access to the programmers market.

I think your point actually corroborates the GP's point about "everybody will be a programmer" being a pipe dream.

It's gotten ever so easy to learn and write programs, and people still don't do it.

Not the patience but the aptitude for it. Writing code simply doesn't require the same amount of intelligence as writing a sentence.

I fully disagree. Many developers struggle just the same.

Writing too much CRUD code makes me unable to complete sentences…

I'm fairly sure that the average programmer today writes scripts for processing data in Python (or in R, Matlab, or something like that). Software engineers, data scientists, and other similar professionals who define themselves by their skills rather than their field are already a minority among programmers.

Or maybe I'm just spending too much time with biologists.

It's true, but my guess is that folks working in software companies don't see much of this. Social scientists alone are running things through Excel/R/SAS all day, let alone more quantitative fields. Software has eaten the world so to speak, it's a subset of "computer science" folks who haven't realized it yet.

> I imagine the trend will continue where deceptively simple interfaces allow people to automate routine tasks.

For that to work you need some equivalent of unix's `|` for disparate systems.

It's been tried but the problem becomes a sufficiently expressive interface between systems.

There is a reason why in 2021 I still occasionally dump stuff to CSV and re-import somewhere else.

True. Even if someone only understand truth table, excel formula and some mathematical operations (max, min, ceil floor avg, mod, root, pow), they can be very useful to support any companies.

Another big reason is that it is so much easier to write powerful software for programmers than non programmers. So at some point it will be easier for the world to teach program to everyone and have that as a baseline than trying to put ever more programmers building specialized programs for non programmers.

I'm not sure what you expect them to be able to do beside using Excel.

Usually the pipe-dream is that some sort of graphical "no-code" or "low-code" system with a crippled DSL will be more benefit than hassle, and enable them to do things without needing to actually know how programming and the whole stack of abstractions they are sitting on work.

It's one of those things that is always 20 years away, like nuclear fusion.

This exists in some form. Its called Alteryx, and I have seen non programmers work on gigabytes of table data using it.

And what is wrong with Excel -- functional programming by formulas, and procedural programming by VBA? Until mid 2000s, many Wall Street Investment banks were still running trading desks making 100M+ USD per year profits (each!) using only Excel for quoting and trading. I assume Biotech and Big Oil still use lots of Excel.

Programming an "AI", perhaps.

That ticks the boxes of deceptively simple interface and programs a few lines long.

It also won't require as much formal training and will be more intuitive and trial error based.

GPT-3 and DALL-E have given us a glimpse of what that will look like.

At most one will create an easily teachable AI they can utilize. But that’s most definitely not the same as training a NN by specifying input/layers, etc.

That's what I meant. Trying to get the already-trained AI to do exactly what you want by modifying the prompt could be thought of as a type of programming and could become a skill-set in itself.

I believe it will either be "fool-proof" and so intuitive as "Follow the wizard and click on the button you want to be clicked when this and that happens", or it won't happen.

I think the biggest obstacle standing between the general populace and computers is the amount of detail one has to provide for a task to become programmable. But it comes up in real life as well.

Absolutely not.

Programming is like, using mathematical structure to instruct a computer.

But many domains don't need you to use mathematics to instruct the computer. Natural language processing, like a search bar, GUI, .

Medicine, legal, so many other trades don't need mathematical instruction of a computer.

They just need not-totally-useless operation of it, through

Either "programming" is not using "mathematical structure" to instruct a computer, OR printf("Hello world\n"); is a "mathematical structure", OR it is not programming.

Which one?

I mean printf is a mathematical structure, you're taking a bunch of bits, interpreting them as unicode or somesuch, and writing it to a log file.

I'm saying that "because" you don't need operations defined mathematically, you can use whatever human computer interface.

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