Comment by d4nt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by d4nt | Hacker News Reader

I think the whole everyone should learn to code this is right, but a little ahead of its time. A little like saying that peasant farmers in the bronze age should learn to read and write. While 100% literacy is now acknowledge as a good thing it took a while to get here. A farmer these days absolutely needs to read and write. But a bronze age farmer? Not so much.

I personally think that one day it will be impossible to function in society without the ability to manipulate and query data. To use Jeff's example, as Mayor of a large city there must be mountains of data that might be relevant to every single decision that is made, and the mayors who can query and gain insight into that data quickly (without having to write a spec and get someone else to do it for them) will eventually be more successful, to the point where all mayors will be expected to be able to manipulate data.

There are a number of things that need to happen before that though:

Firstly, the tools need to get a LOT better. I put our current development tools somewhere a kin to Egyptian hieroglyphics. You can do basic things like record the births and deaths of kings, but could Shakespeare have written what he did in hieroglyphics? I'm guessing not. (Although I bet someone somewhere has done a translation!)

Next, this vision of the future is based on the amount of data in the world getting a LOT bigger. To the point where intuition or past experience simply can't compete with the people who are mining the data.

Politics will probably be one of the last professions to convert, the cultural change will take a while to work though. The first professions will be the kind of things where Excel is used heavily at the moment (you could argue that Excel is a programming environment). Professions like Marketing, Manufacturing (which will become predominately robot driven at some point) and Medicine (which will become heavily influenced by generic programming) will probably be early adopters. But one day, I think "programming" in the sense of giving a "machine" a series of logical instructions to follow, will be universal and it will simply be impossible to live a normal life without that skill.

EDIT: Fixed ironic typo ;)

> current development tools somewhere a kin to Egyptian heiroglyphics. You can do the basic things like...

Ah, no. Heiroglyphics is just somewhere between an alphabet and syllabary - there are 60 odd symbols and they match to sounds like 'a', 'ts', 'gh'.

The stuff you see in museums is the 'posh' stuff for best, there is a quick writing version of it (also known as heiratic) where the full pictures were made more abstract.

> Could Shakespeare have written what he did in hieroglyphics?

For 3,000 years everybody did. Oh, and don't forget little things like inventing hydrolic engineering in hieroglyphics.

Hieroglyphics is as good a writing system as this text I am typing.

> You could argue that Excel is a programming environment.

Actually Excel/spreadsheets are THE programming environment - used by millions of people every day to perform their daily work - loads more than use obscure programming specialist dialects/paradigms like Ruby, or Java or whatever.

I acknowledge you know a lot more about Hieroglyphics than me. But my comments were based on the understanding that it was really the development of an alphabet by the Phoenicians that took writing from an obscure system to something usable by every day people. Maybe this isn't the case?

Also English is widely acknowledged to be a very expressive language compared to, say, Swedish which has a sparser every day vocabulary. I'd be surprised if you told me that the nuance of the finer English texts could be adequately captured in Hieroglyphics.

I agree, Excel is a programming environment. Could do with better version control and debugging though.

I'm sorry there is no evidence that a particular language is 'better' than any other.

All human languages have very similar every day vocabularies - English happens (now) to have a very large specialist vocabulary (which wasn't available to Shakespeare) and which it actually shares with most other languages.

Shakespeare got his vocab up by generating a host of new English words from French, Latin and the other dominant languages of the time.

As we speak the Kiyuku Shakespeare is stealing words for his play.

> the nuance of the finer English texts could be adequately captured in Hieroglyphics

On a technical point you could copy Shakespeare into it now - it has (most) of the current English sounds and with a couple of conventions/accents you would be good to go. I wouldn't recommend switching writing systems anytime soon.

    > All human languages have very similar every day vocabularies

I spent a lot of time working in Sweden and had many conversations with the locals (all of whom know English very well). Many of them remarked that English has more alternative words for something than Swedish and that each one has a subtly different meaning. For example, how you can use "grand" in place of "big" or "large", they all mean roughly the same thing but "grand" brings with it additional meaning. So, my personal experience appears to contradict this statement.

My point is really that languages and alphabets are tools and some tools make certain jobs easier. You could write a website in assembly, but its easier in Rails. However, I suspect our ancestors will look back at Rails and have similar feelings to us when we look back at ancient writing systems now.

I strongly agree with you that data manipulation is becoming the new essential literacy of the information revolution, as reading, writing, and 'rithmetic were to the industrial revolution. As the basis of economic value shifts from materials to information, the people who can best manipulate information will be best positioned to succeed.

An important point to note here is that this skill must come on top of industrial-age skills like the "3 Rs". You have to know reading, writing, and math so that you know what to code (which matters more than the code itself, really).

That said, I think you might be underestimating the speed at which data and coding is permeating various industries. The finance industry has almost totally converted...the head of JP Morgan has boasted, for instance, that they employ more programmers than Microsoft.

Even in politics, most significant campaigns now devote a lot of programming and IT resources to gathering and analyzing information about potential supporters and voters.

> A little like saying that peasant farmers in the bronze age should learn to read and right.

Oh, the irony. :)

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