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Comment by its_so_on | Hacker News Reader

In other words:

The problem with English is that most of the people speaking it, writing it, or teaching it - collectively what I shall call the 'fringe' - could not so much as pen a tolerable introduction to a Penguin Classics paperback.

This is 2012, people. Programming isn't just a profession, it's an everyday skill that everyone should learn, regardless of how badly. PHP is a great enabler for this - and I endorse this direction completely.

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But you teach them to write using well-written prose. You don't grab random comments off the internet and use that as a foundation for writing education.

The problem is programming is still hard, even in 2012. PHP makes it look easy enough on the surface, but people skip learning all the other stuff you have to know to be a competent programmer. They're often completely unaware that they need to learn anything else, or completely uninterested in doing so—they think they're experts already because they can string some lines of PHP together to make a Web site that mostly seems to work, as long as no one's trying to break it.

Then they go on to teach others—other who, just starting out themselves, have no idea they're learning from someone who knows barely any more than they do. Or, they go on and get jobs doing this, and their very amateur code end up out in the wild.

I hate this effect because I'm definitely a fan of anyone who wants to being able to experiment with programming. I got my own start screwing around with code on my family's computers, probably like a lot of us here. Thankfully, I started so young that it was more than a decade before I got a job writing code. I even learned a thing or two in that time!

Of course, I also started with BASIC, then jumped to assembly for two different CPUs before moving onto C and a handful of other languages. Enough curiosity and dedication can get you through less newbie-friendly languages.

Maybe requiring that curiosity and dedication as a barrier to entry is a good thing. I think both are absolutely required, even in 2012, to become even a competent programmer.

Not everyone who programs wants to be a competent programmer, or even a programmer at all. Some people just want to build a contact form for their website, or work out how to pull a list from a database and display it in the sidebar of the their blog.

PHP lets them do that without having to learn anything more complex. Why spend days or weeks learning something when you can work out how to do what you need to do in hours?

If we're going to have amateurs doing things like this, we should at least give them the tools to do it safely without having to know too much, since they're not going to learn more than they have to in order to make something that looks good enough. PHP still requires you to know to avoid HTML/script injection and SQL injection vulnerabilities just to write a safe guestbook.

Why do you believe everyone should learn programming?

I am not `its_so_on` but I would agree that it should be some sort of basic skill that people should probably take for granted.

The first reason is because it's at the bottom of one of the most contentious issues facing modern man: the question of whether we are ultimately mechanical in nature, and what that means moving forward. To understand this you have to understand what machines are, and what they do. It also helps on other contentious matters like understanding how natural selection works -- and that natural selection is possible -- to explain simple genetic algorithms and how 'fitness functions' can be used to indirectly design complex structures.

The second reason is that everybody today owns several computers. The single biggest thing that I use JavaScript for is GreaseMonkey scripts to make my favorite web sites do what I expect them to do. I think a lot of frustration comes from tiny things which we can't control -- and that computers give us a tremendous opportunity to control those tiny things.

They shouldn't. It's just another extreme position. Almost nothing is right for everybody.

This is not flippant, but if you think about it, it's what separates us from animals.

The only thing that separates us from other animals is a persistent desire to separate ourselves from other animals.

Exactly, because that is a sign of self consciousness which is what actually seperates us from other animals ;-)

Dunno, I've seen some evidence that other animals also have self-consciousness. Maybe it's the fact that we're uppity about it.

Everybody should have basic programming skills, just like math, writing, etc.

That doesn't mean we have to be happy with the shitty way things are currently done.

That doesn't answer the question of WHY everybody should have that skill set.

  Smoking isn't just a profession, it's an everyday skill
  that everyone should learn, regardless of how badly. 
  A cigarette is a great enabler for this - and I endorse 
  this direction completely.

  -- Your friendly tobacco association.

I can't vote this down enough.

I have worked with a lot of people and mentored quite a few at companies I've worked at. Some were designers, some weren't even in the IT departments. Any that wanted to learn something about we programming I lead in the direction of PHP which I cut me teeth on before moving onto other things (currently Scala). They could get a dev environment up and running in no time, and better than that they could actually host something they did on shared hosting for practically nothing (or actually nothing as I sometimes gave people sandboxes in my hosting).

PHP is a gentle introduction to server concepts and have a fairly simple and not-too abstract syntax. Yes yes, when you really look at it there are some fairly glaring inconsistencies but the reality these people were not at the stage where they would notice or care.

It's also embarrassing to me as a professional who, like most, believe that some knowledge in programming will be of great use to people (in business or otherwise) and try my best to support anyone I know wanting to learn something or better themselves that this attitude is so common and outspoken with no logical justification or attempt at rational counter argument. Programming is hard. Good programming is harder, and the levels at which some of us seem to hold everyone around us (and yet somehow I doubt they hold themselves to every minute at work) are unrealistic and can push people further away than do what we should be aiming for which is bringing people in.

I'm really proud of every one of the people who stuck with learning and letting me help them and I think it's appalling to belittle their efforts indirectly with comments like this.

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