Coding, Everyone?

There’s been an increasing call in the US that everyone learn how to code (write computer programs). This call comes even from Obama. Part of the reason is to improve the employability of people as software continues to step into more and more fields.

A software engineer, Chase Felker, argued against this call. He correctly points out that there is a world of difference between knowing the basics of programming v/s being a good, employable programmer:
“Without knowing more of the bigger picture, you’re forced to hack away at a problem, which can take you pretty far until you run into one that is better solved by more careful design.”

Then there’s the problem of identifying who you would learn from? Because software expertise is not tied to degrees:
“Your credentials are primarily the programs you have written, not the stature of the professor whose lab you cleaned.”
Unfortunately, you can’t see the programs anyone else wrote (they’d be owned by the company that guy works for). So quacks and charlatans would have a field day!

And unlike, say, physics, Felker says programming is never a spectator sport:
“I imagine that people get excited about physics by reading some Bad Astronomy or Richard Feynman’s QED, but no one jumps from reading about physics to doing physics...With programming, however, there’s very little separation between appreciating and making something.”
Reading and appreciating is easy; writing (doing) is hard.

Sure, people can learn programming for the problem solving high you get:
“Yes, it is a creative endeavor. At its base, it’s problem-solving, and the rewards for exposing holes in your thinking and discovering elegant solutions are awesome.”
Or they could learn it for specific applications relevant to their area of work, like in genetics or fields involving statistical analysis or whatever. But please, please don’t confuse that with knowing how to be a programmer.

Ultimately, as Felker says:
“We don’t need everyone to code—we need everyone to think.”
And that’s a tough ask any day, anywhere.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more