Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Take mathematics for instance. What students learn in school is important, yes, but it causes a hatred toward math in general. In a typical high school, 90% of kids dread Algebra, Geometry, and PreCalc. These classes are miserable to them, and consequentially, they associate mathematics with their aversion from imposed education. Because of this, the wonderful world of numbers is reduced to mere repetition.
For those who appreciate the beauty in mathematics, this must be depressing.
I'm afraid that CS may have a similar downfall if we mandate programming curricula. Maybe a more subtle approach is necessary.
It would focus on things like demystifying probability and balancing check books and other things that sort of fall under numeracy.
I realize lots of people will like to complain that those aren't topics for school, but the current program in the U.S. is anyway watering down the academic track. People that have not yet seen any beauty in math would get much more value from practical lessons designed to mostly be engaging than they get from suffering through abstract math that is mostly designed to be foundational.
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/
There are requirements for knowledge across the traditional academic divisions of Algebra/Geometry/Trigonometry.
I'm not arguing against teaching those things to as many people as possible, just observing that lots of people probably don't have that knowledge 2 years later and may be better served with more practical stuff.
On the other hand, I'm just some random person with a lot of opinions about education and little actual experience with it. A summary of my opinions is that a single social-promotion school track meant for everyone is completely awful.
I am saying that if you were in my high school and weren't expecting to go to college, there were courses designed for you across all disciplines to teach you practical life skills. However, I do think the school still required students to struggle through at least some of the standard curriculum.
Programming is the new literacy for the 21st Century.
Charlemagne was the first and only illiterate Holy Roman Emperor. This current generation of business and political leaders are the only generation that can remain software illiterate.
No, We wont expect Fortune 500 leaders to do production coding but we don't expect the Managing Editor of a newspaper to write articles either - but they must be literate as well as everything else expected.
"I'm not good with computers" will be the 21st century equivalent of "I can't read good"
The real benefit of programming for non-programmers is being able to break large problems into small, solvable ones, and logically assemble those small solutions into various larger ones (even outside of the original problem; code reuse, as it were). This is a skill you can learn a myriad of ways, but computing is perhaps the first time we've had a mechanism by which you can directly practice it in a non-contrived, endlessly extensible manner.
Just look at tools like Parse or Visual Studio Code Search. The future is going to be very, very different from the present.
THink perhaps less "new literacy" and maybe "new car driving". But I feel literacy is more the thing.
Or at least that's how i remember it. A friend of mine who's now an history researcher told me recently how that thing disgusted him from computers for 20 years.
Can you please elaborate? Was it the infantilism? Or something else? Does your friend pursue coding now?
Logo and other "beginner" languages are more about introductions to using computers to create, not about teaching programming.
1. It intimidated him. Happened to some friends of mine. 2. He realized history is better than writing procedural code . Should have learnt haskell
LOGO was crated as part of the new learning theory explorations at MIT and else where during the 1980s..
But in your friend defense Logo was designed for kids at a certain mental age...obviously your friend was beyond that age when exposed to LOGO
(1) What real world problem to solve.
(2) For a challenging problem, how the heck to solve it.
(3) How to cut through by far consistently the worst writing anywhere in civilization -- documentation in computing.
E.g., I'm still mud wrestling trying to figure out why: (A) In program A, serialize an instance of a class. The result of the serialization is a byte array. (2) To check, in program A, deserialize the byte array and observe that do get the original instance back. (C) In program A, printout the byte array as hex. Transmit the byte array to program B. In program B, print out the byte array in hex and observe that it is just the same as it was in program A. (D) Deserialize the byte array in program B and observe that the operation ends with and exceptional condition. Why? Documentation clear as mud.
Just for my basic work, I have about two cubic feet of books, nearly all badly written, and 5000+ Web pages of documentation illustrating much of the worst mistakes in technical writing.
The bad documentation is by far the worst bottleneck.
The whole thing, the industry and the science, needs to take Technical Writing 101. First lesson: A word used with a meaning not in a standard dictionary is a 'term', and never but never ever, not even once, use a term without a prior clear definition with motivation and likely examples. And, for such definitions, sure, use hyperlinks.
(5) Organization and management of computing projects involving teams larger that, say, half a dozen people.
(6) Computer system construction, installation, configuration, backup and recovery, monitoring, management, and administration.
(7) Security.
Man, that was head-slammingly difficult for an intro course. The prereqs said only a knowledge of Algebra was required. But it took a lot of time to get used to. The only kids who did well were the ones who had already been programming for a couple years.
I didn't even know how to do command-line prompts in windows. I remembered a few things back when I had to use MSDOS to fire up games, but that was about it.
That all being said, I sincerely believe everyone should learn how to program. And I furthermore sincerely believe the public school system should stay as far away as possible from trying to impose a model for a one-size-fits-none way to do so.
Not about programming itself.
We were designing systems for millennia before computers existed. All the basic algorithms we use in programming today were invented before computers.
Computers just happen to make systems a lot more reliable, performant and scalable (if designed right), since computers have evolved to complement us (i.e. we're bad at what computers are good at and vice versa).
I don't think programming is the new literacy, I think understanding the common principles that tie system behavior together has always been the highest form of skill for any human to possess.
As for turning a system design into code, if you know how to design the system on a higher level, you can always delegate the "boring" act of coding itself.
I'm a programmer, but I understand that the act of programming by itself, even though I find it enjoyable, isn't that interesting on its own. It's only interesting in terms of how the program I'm writing connects to a system where the real world and real people are involved. All programs, with no exception, either interface directly with people, or interface with other programs that do interface with people.
Currently we conflate programming with the act of designing systems (algorithms, design patterns etc.), but I expect sooner or later system design and programming will split into separate "trades". Would it be a resurgence of cybernetics, or a brand new branch of science, I don't know.
But it'll happen. And it'll be good, because many programmers use computers as their golden hammer of system design, and it's hardly the only component of a good system.
> Not about programming itself.
Basically correct. So, the grades 1-8 or so work in 'computer science' will be of questionable value.
E.g., my wife had no background in computing at all. I taught her programming at the level of if-then-else, do-while, allocate-free, call-return, try-catch, plus quite a lot in about a week. Then I gave her a lecture on 'rule-based', 'expert system', 'artificial intelligence' (AI) programming, and right away she wrote a nice, first program. I gave her a second lecture, and right away she wrote the best, early AI program I and my research group ever saw. No biggie. For 'computer science' in grades 1-8, looks like mostly a waste of time.
> All the basic algorithms we use in programming today were invented before computers.
Not really. E.g., there are books with collections of algorithms by, say, Knuth, Sedgewick, and others, and more on, say, error correcting codes and how transactions work in relational database, that really are "basic" but were invented just for the world of computing and digital communications.
People have used a simple form of error detection checksum when copying books manually (like the Bible) thousands of years ago.
Retransmission requests based on error detection like the above have been use over various pre-electronic communication channels, like telegraphs, which is a form of error correction scheme.
Of course anything that requires a modern CPU to compute wouldn't be feasible, but the basics of it, the seed, was.
Transaction protocols can be observed before computers especially in military protocols where "distributed coordination" and consistency of command are crucial for carrying out a military mission. Their channels of communications were slow and unreliable.
I suppose I don't have to also point out same military protocols often required a log where every formal exchange is written down in order, for later review if needed. Here are your modern day database transaction logs.
I can also cite famous examples of encryption schemes going back to the Roman empire, before computers existed, but we all know those.
We assign names to various inventions and we tend to think no one before had any idea like that, but truth is good ideas keep getting "reinvented" over and over, and the only difference is the level of sophistication that computers afford us in combining such concepts and building upon them into more complex schemes.
By the way in ancient Egypt, every person would be registered and written down in a set of books, books would be split and sorted by a hash of their name for easy look up.
Yup. Ancient Egypt had a hash-based index for their database of people (and books are the hashmap buckets).
I still believe that what Hamming did in coding theory and the Reed-Solomon codes, etc., are 'basic' and new since computers.
But, you are correct that transmission error detection and correction were old needs with old solutions. E.g., there was parity with teletypewriters and old paper tape for error detection and then retransmission for error correction. Yes, and the improvements Hamming, etc., made for computers were not feasible before computers, but I still believe that, while the problem was old and had old solutions, the work of Hamming, etc. was new and 'basic'.
Yes, heap sort doesn't really work as a sorting technique before computers, but trying to dream up heap sort is not easy -- just for the heck of it, once I set aside reading how heap sort worked and tried to dream up such a thing for about two weeks and couldn't do it. Heap sort's darned clever.
Each one of us struggles to add something to the stream of human thought, and it's hard every time, and it's worth praise every time, but it's interesting to see it all as a part of a bigger picture, in that computers are just systems like any. They have certain properties emphasized, and certain other properties de-emphasized right now, but that's it.
I actually didn't go far enough in my error detection and correction examples, I only went few thousand years back. There's an even more ancient example, going back millions of years... the process of DNA replication itself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofreading_(Biology)
One shouldn't be surprised to discover that some cellular process might have stumbled onto heap sorting, either.
System design is bigger and older than any of us. To think otherwise is just a sign our culture is just too young yet to appreciate where we fit in the world. In some ways, it seems we still think we're at the center of the Universe.
We're not inventing algorithms, just rediscovering them. This doesn't make any of the achievements of our inventors any lesser, but it's good to keep in mind the big picture. It helps us, among other things, to look in more places for inspiration and knowledge, and in turn, create better systems.