Pope Francis encourages more children to code, especially in Catholic countries | Hacker News Reader

Pope Francis encourages more children to code, especially in Catholic countries

bbc.com

40 pointslsllc50 comments

If the JS community keeps up the current vibes plenty of engineers will come to Jesus on their own. Lots of Pharisee and Sadducee energy out there on twitter & stackoverflow. If you read the Gospel of Mark and read up on how Jesus bopped the thought leaders in his community at the time you’ll see lots of parallels.

Does that make GitHub the holy temple where the merchants hawk their wares?

I will tear down this app and rebuild it in 3 days.

If your username is a reference to St. Francis of Assisi, I love it.

SQLite adopted The Rule of St. Benedict as their code of conduct relatedly which I think is nice (although the project's history with use in military is really not to my liking). So some coders do express overt Catholicism in their career.

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

AFAIK that was for trolling the covenant CoC.

I wonder if teaching kids the law is a better investment. Many people including myself seem naive to the way the legal system really works. I guess there are already enough lawyers, but at the same time lawyers are very expensive.

exactly…. i think this would be way better but as you say there is the problem that lawyers do not compete on price and know their value and there are systems in place that keep you from undercutting. this is what we need in our industry too.

Or financial literacy. Too many folk don't understand compounding interest (and more!)

Law feels like such an earthly affair, bound up in so many earthly concern, so far from the spirit of God's image.

With code, the will is free. We are exultant & great, individually, as we code.

A Catholic hacker army? Could there be a digital crusade?

Deus vult! Jokes aside, coming from a very Catholic country (Poland) I think nobody really cares what the Pope thinks or says about coding.

You are right about the waning influence of Richard Stallman.

They congregate at TempleOS.

Maybe Pope Francis is trying to troll Dan Simmons in writing a followup to the Hyperion saga.

What should they code with? [HolyC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS)?

meh, while Python is the modern Basic and general all-round utility, it's not IMHO a very good first language, with quite extensive (and sometimes messy) syntax, not to mention the glaring mistake (again very IMHO) of significant-whitespace.

Scratch, and other block codes are a good first contact, but for text languages, I think something like Lua is a much simpler, and therefore better introduction. And it's great for games (love2d, pico8/tic80, roblox, etc), which is what can really motivate kids.

Of all the languages to choose it was the serpent. I find that highly amusing.

lol

what will getting more children to program achieve? create an oversupply of programmers and computer scientists leading to a race to the bottom?

God forbid people will know the language of the software eating the world?

More than anything, interact better with AI. LLMs make the basic interaction better, but the computers still need to be spoonfed conditionals and command order.

More people being able to express themselves creatively? New programming languages, companies, new ideas, more decentralization? Science and technology are far from being completely explored, many problems far from automated.

so what are you going to tell these kids? that they are guaranteed a well paying job if they learn all this shit?

as long as they know it is just for creative expression and they WANT to do it that’s cool. but i am afraid the motives are different.

Don't think "person who has a job doing programming". Think "person who has random menial tasks in their job or life, and wants to automate them".

Not everyone needs to be able to implement an arbitrary program. Everyone ought to be able to write a five-line script to make their life easier and save themselves some time.

Knowing how to use power tools doesn’t mean you’re going to start building barns and start a workshop doing SFX for movies. There’s tons of people who code who don’t consider themselves a programmer because they work in an adjacent field (think of R or matlab).

you could also argue that everybody should know the law. but people don’t. same with personal finance.

I mean, yes. We should teach personal finance & how to learn the law.

Do you think their chances of landing a programming job is enhanced or degraded by learning about programming? You’re arguing for ignorance. Not a great position to take.

You don’t need to know how to program to be succesful in life. In my career as an engineer most of the people I encountered who are wildly succesful are not engineers and cannot program.

Software touches so many aspects of our lives now, you don't have to enter into a career as a software engineer to make it worth your while.

An anecdotal example: my home is "smart", with connected light switches, fans and such. I could have spent a ton of money doing that buying premium components that are all part of one cohesive system. But I didn't, I saved money by buying from different systems and using Home Assistant to tie them all together. As user friendly as HA tries to be, "buy a Raspberry Pi and install this custom Linux distro" is a pretty intimidating pitch to a non-programmer. But someone who knew their way around would be happy doing so.

More automation and a higher quality of life.

Pfft, yeah, software devs. What good have they ever produced for society or those who depend on them. Better teach them how to dig ditches and truly unleash their human potential.

there was a time when most people couldn't write, and so you could have a well-paid job just if you're able to write. there was literally a job called a "scribe" where the only requirement was being able to write.

it just never stops. you learn some economically valuable skill, like writing, coding, and then some asshole teaches it to everyone and the skill becomes worthless.

Pope is also in on the push to increase the supplies of coders so as to suppress wages. Et tu pope?

Hopefully he declares OOP as unholy.

*anathema

Watching the morning news in Italy is a deluge of papal updates.

Every day the guy says something or condemns something or endorses something.

So no wonder he ended up talking of this, I guess the list of arguments was getting short.

I don't think he even knows what he is talking about as his speeches usually are ghost-written.

Would jquery programmers be opus dei of the programming world?

Why is the BBC only one reporting this.

I'm holding out for HolyC++

The question on my mind is what does the vatican endorse for an editor: vi or emacs?

what is a "Catholic country"?

Compare, say Saudi Arabia to say, Italy. See if you can tell the difference.

Italy is secular republic, while the KSA is an absolute monarchy.

I'm still failing to see which one is a "Catholic country" unless you are somehow conflating Italy with the Holy See, another absolute monarchy.

I could just as well have said Spain, France, or Latin America.

Ah, the ol' papal endorsement—that'll encourage the kids! /s

god help us when it starts to

That’s rather what they have in mind, yes.

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