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Going a little tangential.

> He seems to think that school shouldn't be primarily about training people to be "useful" to employers or the government in the short term. I'm somewhat inclined to agree.

I entirely agree; it's something I've been trying to point out for a few years now.

Something people don't recognize about, say, feminist theory on agency and objectification is that it's a subject that applies everywhere. In this case, it's the objectification of people in general as tools for businesses and governments, rather than as individuals with their own particular needs and desires with intrinsic worth. We're uninterested in discussing what a student wants to learn and instead prefer discussing a paternalistic notion of what a student ought to be required to learn.

For some reason, we've lost the vocabulary for discussing things outside of an economic context. It's probably because bringing up questions of morality is scary: between the polarizing force of political religion and the lack of education in forming one's own moral and ethical system, moral claims find little traction unless they're merely repeating something with wide support.

> With this comment, the linked piece seems to be implying that the statements made by Zuckerberg, Clinton et al are inspired by wrongheaded beliefs about the purpose of education, and that only will.i.am's statement comes anywhere close to hitting the right tone. I read this comment as genuinely complimentary, albeit weak.

Fair enough, but is Gates's claim that "learning to write programs stretches your mind" really that far off or that much worse? Or that "an understanding of computer science is becoming increasing essentially in today's world"? Maybe it's a trivial point, but is it as offensive as this link makes it out to be?

I think the point Bret Victor is trying to make is that what he perceives as the real value of programming (its use as a powerful extension of the programmer's cognitive abilities) is absent entirely from the perception of programming as an inherently good thing that code.org and related groups are pushing.

Programming is, and ought to be seen as, merely a means to an end – not an end in and of itself. A movement that gets programming into to schools by claiming code is itself a Good Thing will inevitably bring into existence a programming curriculum that ignores the important abstract stuff about coding-as-a-concept (the new ways in which computers can extend the mind) and focuses instead on the concrete "implementation details" of programming today (text files, the command line, and all that other baggage from 20 years ago with which programmers are still saddled).

Basically: the reasoning is important, the code isn't, and code.org is all about the code.

> Programming is, and ought to be seen as, merely a means to an end – not an end in and of itself.

This is the essential piece I thought Bret made clear by highlighting the choice quotes from Seymour Papert.

Treating programming as a means to an end has very pragmatic ramifications for programming. It means we can question the value of our tools when they do not serve our goals. Otherwise we are the mercy of them (and entrench the status quo as state-of-the-art).

One question I've been grappling with is why it takes so many human-hours of work to produce conceptually simple programs.

Except that these quotes are also about coding as the mreasnsd to an end. The ends may not be as elevated, but employment, pride, security and such are powerfully motivating ends. I think its really amazing to think about the intellectual power of coding -- I think philosophy tends to pay more attention to physics and not enough to engineering -- but more immediate human goals are perfectly appropriate ones to serve as the ends for which learning to code is the means.

> As I read it, Bret Victor's critique of code.org is more nuanced than the usual complaints: it stems from a disagreement with code.org's implicit claim that programming should be taught in schools because programming is currently a high-value skill, in terms of the amount of money you can earn by doing it professionally. He seems to think that school shouldn't be primarily about training people to be "useful" to employers or the government in the short term. I'm somewhat inclined to agree.

I'm inclined to agree (with what you explained) as well. But, if this is conveyed by the article/graphic, it sure is subtle. I think it would have been a better article if he just explained his complaint (if it is as you say), rather than making a mockery of celebrity quotes with big sarcastic quotes next to pictures of their faces.

> In the context of Victor's body of work (which is focused more or less entirely on making the incredible power of computers more accessible to more people), I have a hard time believing that any such motivation underlies the linked piece. While I think there definitely exists such a motivation in other criticisms of the learn-to-code meme, I don't think it has much to do with Victor's critiques.

Yeah, I was mostly referring to the negativity towards code.org and coding as basic literacy in general, not this author specifically. But that's good to know at least in this case he's not one of those people.

> But, if this is conveyed by the article/graphic, it sure is subtle. I think it would have been a better article if he just explained his complaint (if it is as you say), rather than making a mockery of celebrity quotes with big sarcastic quotes next to pictures of their faces.

Yeah – it's entirely possible that I'm putting my own words about the learn-to-code movement into someone else's mouth unwarranted. I think the linked piece is more of a frustration-fueled rant than a fully-thought-out criticism, and that the author is trying to quickly capture the spirit of a half-formed argument that he hasn't yet fully explored.

At any rate, it resonated with me, although it took me a few reads to get the gist of what he was trying to say.

Here's the gist if what he was saying https://gist.github.com/8394393. Sorry, I had to ;).