Hacker News Reader

Comment by umut | Hacker News Reader

what is this obsession with teaching your kids how to program? I would not want my future kids do the same always worrying occupation that I do... probably the world as well as programming will be totally different then anyways. Just teach him/her some analytical thinking through 100 year old games and let the evolution play his part. There is no such thing as full control of your kid's destiny, just forget about it already...

View on HN

> what is this obsession with teaching your kids how to program? I would not want my future kids do the same always worrying occupation that I do ...

But chances are they won't. Review the history of literacy and print media. Early on, reading and writing was a specialty practiced by cloistered monks, and delivered in finished form to an ignorant public. Later on, because of technical breakthroughs, social policy changes rightly decreed that everyone should become literate.

We take for granted that everyone should know how to read and write words, but we're in transition with respect to the same issue in computer literacy -- the ability to, so to speak, read and write code.

Being able to program a computer in the future won't remotely resemble how it looks today, any more than modern print literacy resembles quill pens and parchment scrolls.

I completely agree with you. We focus on creating levels and computational thinking. But most importantly we want kids of all ages and of both genders to be wanting to become Computer Scientists.

We drive our kids to ballet class, but are reasonably sure they will never be professional dancers. Same for baseball, violin, karate, and so on. But those activities generally do grow things like teamwork, patience, coordination, fitness, etc. Not to mention an enjoyable sense of satisfaction when a difficult task is finally accomplished after a lot of hard work.

Enriching foundations and building useful skillsets is not the same thing as taking "full control of your kid's destiny".

Teaching kids how to code does not mean that they will become programmers. Just like teaching them how to fish does not mean they will become fishermen. You are teaching them a skill that they can use (or not) in their adult life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com