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Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

With stuff like this, we degrade the quality of our profession over time.

Dont get me wrong, i like the idea and its good to have more people who understand programming. On the other hand it will also yield alot of low quality programmers, because the higher quality learn to code out of their own interest anyway. So in the end i am not convinced that its a good thing to have even more Rails programmers working for 15$ an hour.

Yes programming is a valuable skill, but i dont agree it needs to be more of a universal skill to people like carpentry or plumbering for example. The people that need it for their job will have to learn it, the people that are passionate about it will learn it, all others will probably never learn it because it requires a ton of work and they end up on the low end, and we really have enough of bad programmers.

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> On the other hand it will also yield alot of low quality programmers, because the higher quality learn to code out of their own interest anyway. So in the end i am not convinced that its a good thing to have even more Rails programmers working for 15$ an hour.

Very few people would argue that by teaching everyone to write, the job of being a professional writer is degraded. What we are saying is that coding is a form of literacy now. We are not advocating that everyone become a professional programmer; and similarly, teaching people to write is not advocating that everyone become a professional writer.

In many jobs knowledge of computational thinking will be important.

Computational thinking != programming.

I think the objective you're aiming towards would be better served by attempting to raise the bar on mathematical thinking and reasoning. Programming can have a part to play in that, but I'd argue that you'd get much more benefit for equal cost simply by performing studies on which forms of mathematical teaching actually taught students mathematics.

Programming can be really helpful for teaching mathematical thinking and reasoning. It's a fun way to approach the subject from a different angle.

Many kids hate math but might enjoy programming. It's important to engage students. They'll learn a lot more if they enjoy it.

Many kids also hate programming. It's boring, sitting there in front of a screen all the time, typing in incomprehensible text that the computer throws back in your face because you missed a comma here or a semicolon there. There's a huge groupthink bias here in favor of programming as the solution to all problems here at Hacker News because we're all programmers and we tend to frame problems and solutions in a way that makes them amenable to solving via programming.

That's why I suggested that we need to figure out what sort of math education works, rather than suggesting a particular alternative. There is research showing what kinds of mathematical education is effective. I posit that we would be much better off asking for those results to be put into practice everywhere, rather than foisting yet another folklore-based curriculum onto our already overburdened teachers.

The notion that teaching programming at an early age will somehow degrade the software engineering profession is simply preposterous. The fact that I took Spanish for 4 years certainly doesn't devalue the translation profession. Learning how to code is like learning a foreign language-- it takes time to master and is best learned when being fully immersed in it. But that doesn't preclude from introducing it earlier. In fact, it will probably have the opposite affect that you imagine. After my years of failing to learn Spanish, I have a profound respect for those who can speak it so easily. And because I know good bilingual speakers are hard to come by, I would probably pay a premium for their talents if my day job required me to interface with Spanish-speaking cultures.

Good point, but i dont agree. You learn a language to be able to communicate with people in different countries, to be able to travel the world and find your way through it. Most people dont want to pursue a career in the language they are learning.

Programming on the other hand is a niche skill which you absolutely do not need to know or master in this world. Maths, Physics, Chemistry and languages are skills that are much more important in terms of a general skill-set to master daily life than programming is.

Programming is for people that pursue a career in the IT industry or science. Is it a nice skill to have ? Sure, just like carpentry or mechanical engineering.

>Programming on the other hand is a niche skill which you absolutely do not need to know or master in this world. Maths, Physics, Chemistry and languages are skills that are much more important in terms of a general skill-set to master daily life than programming is.

That's does not compute to me. Why is chemistry an inherently more important than programming?

"Programming is for people that pursue a career in the IT industry or science. Is it a nice skill to have ? Sure, just like carpentry or mechanical engineering."

And we never expose anyone to the beginnings of those disciplines in school, ever, do we?

We do, just like programming, so whats your point ?

That if they are niche skills, like programming, and we teach the beginnings of them, why are you so opposed to people being taught the beginnings of programming?

I am not against that, i am just not a fan of this whole new "everyone needs to know how to program" hypetrain.

So exposing more kids to programming early, allowing them to pick up the basics, become more comfortable with the concepts and in general get better at it earlier - that will degrade the profession?

What colour is the sky in your world? That's the most backward thinking I've encountered in a long time.

Getting more kids exposed to code can only increase the number of good, competent programmers. If it increases the number of mediocre programmers as well so what?

The world is increasingly run on high technology software and hardware platforms, some understanding of this should be useful to everyone, and helping more people towards real understanding and skill in the field is a good thing, not a bad one.

The world also has over 1 Billion cars, individual transport changed everything and is a massive worldwide industry, does that mean everyone has to understand how they work ? No i dont think so, and that can be said about alot of other technological advances that are part of our professional and private lives today.

In the first DotCom boom every John Doe who could write some HTML got a job as a programmer and everyone studied IT in that time to make the big bucks. With the current shortage in the US i bet the scenario is likely going in the same direction and in a few years they end up like all the unemployed lawyers today.

Of course its not bad to expose kids to programming, but i argue that its not very useful because you need years of experience to make anything useful and that point is only reached by people that have the passion for it anyway.

'does that mean everyone has to understand how they work ?'

A little bit, yes, enough to get them maintained, keep them road safe, put the right fuel in, yup.

'i argue that its not very useful because you need years of experience to make anything useful and that point is only reached by people that have the passion for it anyway.'

How does someone know if they're interested of passionate about something if they're never exposed to it?

How do you know to embark on the path leading to years of experience unless you have an intro to it?

This is not about getting every moron into the profession, it's about giving people a start who otherwise might never know that programming is a thing, especially as more and more computing devices are geared to straight consumption.

Dont know about the US, but in Germany everyone will be exposed to programming in some part of their school career.

Of course there are possibilities to totally avoid it, but if you do that you probably have a reason.

I'm not in the US, I'm in the UK, where computer related education seems to come down to 'here is how to write a letter in word, start an excel spreadsheet and open mspaint', which is entirely inadequate.

I disagree. You're concerned about polluting the marketplace when, in fact, the marketplace is already polluted. There are already poor Rails programmers who work for $15/hour -- prob not in the US, but certainly elsewhere. It's not just programming, either. Every industry has the full gamut of high-performing people, and low-performing people.

Managers will continue to have to get better at what they do -- hiring good talent. If you need to hire enterprise sales people, and you picked up a high school kids because they sold clothes at Banana Republic senior year, you deserve what you get. So why would anyone fill an enterprise Rails engineer role with someone just because they took a high school Rails course?

If anything, a basic understanding of what programming is will help elevate the awareness of how complex it is to those managers. Programming is so much more than a craft.

Every programmer knows that feeling of being asked a tech support question. These things obviously have nothing to do with what programmers are great at. More importantly, being good at tech support says nothing about programming. But to most people, it's just "computer stuff."

Designers aren't asked to come paint a house. Accountants aren't asked for stock tips. Someday, programmers won't be asked antivirus questions anymore.

I disagree that programming is "more than a craft". No, I think the craft analogy for programming is quite appropriate. In fact, I am of the opinion that much of the absolute and utter failure of so-called software engineering to deliver meaningful improvements in programmer productivity has been due to its repeated failed attempts to apply engineering discipline to what is essentially a craft problem. After all, we don't have "wood engineering" for carpenters and cabinetmakers. We don't have "fabric engineering" for tailors and dressmakers. Engineering principles are designed to solve known problems in a reliable and repeatable manner. We understand that cabinetmakers and dressmakers don't deal with the same problems (or necessarily even the same sort of problem) day in and day out. That's why we don't apply engineering principles to those positions. So why do we insist on applying engineering principles to programming?

Designers aren't asked to come paint a house. Accountants aren't asked for stock tips. Someday, programmers won't be asked antivirus questions anymore.

Those are bad analogies. Like it or not, antivirus software is significantly more closely related to programming than, say, house painting is to design. Better analogies would have been, "Surgeons aren't asked questions about dermatology. Divorce lawyers aren't asked questions about tax law." Except, that's not true, is it? People do ask surgeons questions about their skin lesions, because, "Hey, a doctor's a doctor, right?" People do ask divorce lawyers tax law questions because "Hey, law is law, right?" And people will continue to ask programmers about anti-virus software because, hey, computers are computers, right?

I'm not sure that is a real concern. Programming has been part of the school curriculum here for a long time. My father, who is now in his mid-50s, even learned programming in high school. I don't see many people coming from that system working as programmers. Learning about something doesn't mean there will be interest in actually pursuing a career in it.

Its a large gap between teaching someone to write code, and program. A lot of current implementations of CS and Programming classes are just teaching a student the basic blocks, and how to use them in an environment like Java. The problem is, without the more complex blocks and the ability to understand how they fit together as a whole (not just in one language), students really just end up with a set of skills in purgatory.

We're focusing much more on giving people a fundamental understanding of what programming is and how to problem solve with code.

The idea isn't just to teach syntax or a specific language, but rather to teach students how to think and give them an intro to what programming is and let them decide if it's worth pursuing as a career or major in college.

I'm confused as to what qualifies a child in your eyes to begin learning programming. Do they have to want to start learning themselves, with no external stimuli? How do you propose that that characteristic correlates with future programming effectiveness?

I agree with you in every point, but don't worry. Laziness is part of the human condition, and in order to properly learn how to program one must be able to overcome that. Most people are not able to do this.

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