Coding is not the new literacy

http://www.chris-granger.com/2015/01/26/coding-is-not-the-new-literacy/

by wglass • 11 years ago

229 147 11 years ago

desdiv• 11 years ago

Previous discussion from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8947603

Teaching systems thinking is hard. Even higher institutions of education haven't figured out how to teach it properly and they are in the business of teaching stuff. Sprinkling computational magic dust over it will not help.

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

Computational magic dust has this magic(!) feature that you can't pretend you understand anymore - if you're stupid about your model, it just won't work, period. Machines are unforgiving, and they only give you absolutely honest feedback.

quikoa• 11 years ago

On a syntax/grammar level the compiler is very strict. For plenty of interesting problems you can often get away with stupid/buggy models. Not that it's usually a good idea...

rjbwork• 11 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly.

We have some QA folks at work. Our best is a former database programmer from way back in the day, and she has a REALLY good "systems way of thinking" and has a mental model of how things work and are united conceptually. This ability, her "systems way of thinking" sets her far and away above every other QA person I've ever worked with.

Being able to come up with a mental model of a system and encode it, either in code or as a document or description is truly valuable in today's increasingly complex and nuanced world.

Animats• 11 years ago

When you get to the end of the article, it turns out that they're building the next generation of Visual Basic.

That's not a fundamentally bad idea. It's also interesting that they focus on modeling and simulation. That's what Alan Kay thought personal computers were going to be for. But all we got is the VisiCalc/Lotus/Excel world. That's useful, but limited.

The problem with visual programming languages has usually been that they don't scale. You end up with a huge collection of lines and boxes. (For a good example, find a game implemented with Blender's game engine and open up the wiring diagram.) They have a chance of solving that problem, because program interconnection has made some progress since the days of Hypercard and UNIX pipes.

There are a lot of line-and-box programming systems in domain-specific areas. LabView, for industrial and research control systems, is one of the most successful. But no one has yet solved the scaling problem. On larger problems, things just get too tangled.

CmonDev• 11 years ago

It's just his business, he wants to keep making IDEs with a visual aspect to them, so he has to produce posts like this to justify it to the investors. Would be great if he finished the previous one before starting the new one though. Finishing is a skill mankind would benefit from even more: http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game

zubairq• 11 years ago

His last project was LightTable, and provided huge value to people. Can I ask if you ever even used it?

pjmlp• 11 years ago

I hope they get the next generation of Smalltalk/Lisp Machines.

We need to have coding systems like Wolfram|Alpha being mainstream, not Visual Basic.

LoSboccacc• 11 years ago

problem is, the hard part is not coding, the hard part is transforming requirements and workflows into logical structure a computer can understand.

that's the bottleneck, whatever the language.

the new literacy would be not just to see a lego construction and understand the pieces involved, but to see the final construction and to be able to recover the build instructions by sheer mind gymnastic.

chii• 11 years ago

the hard part is transforming requirements and workflows into logical structure

that's like saying for painting a picture, the hard part is knowing where to put the paint. The act of slashing paint on canvas itself is trivial.

I think the real problem is that there hasn't been any proper primitives created - primitives that can be linked together to produce what looks like another primitive. I guess the non-physicalness isn't helping, because lego works really well as a building primitive.

jvickers• 11 years ago

Sometimes when I've had a module of about 500-2000 lines, I have thought that much of it could be represented pictorially in a way that could also be understood by a machine.

fit2rule• 11 years ago

>That's what Alan Kay thought personal computers were going to be for.

This prediction did work out in one area that computing has always been significant: music-making. If you consider that your average synthesizer is an analog computer with a process pipeline, modern software has definitely fulfilled the modelling/simulation goals set by the pioneers in the early years. The average electronic musician using a computer to compute sound is well and truly driving a computing process with modelling techniques - though there is a very wide scope of variety between the interface being used to produce this result, it is true -nevertheless in the synthesizer world, these concepts have lived on and matured. Play with puredata (http://puredata.info/) or any one of the thousands of other sound modelling/synthesis applications out there and you'll see this reality.

The challenge then becomes to figure out how to turn your average business process into a synthesis, of sorts, which can be modelled in an analogous fashion ..

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

I have to partially disagree with Chris here on two aspects.

First of all, programming indeed seems to be a fundamental thing, on the level of reading, writing and arithmetics. It gives you new classes of mental tools that allow you to think thoughts previously unthinkable.

People sometimes say it's very arrogant of some programmers to think they have something important to say in fields of biology, physics, philosophy, etc. But it's not arrogance. There are important insights in CS shining light on every other branch of science that are often noticed by people related to programming and CS fields because no one else is trained to think in this fundamental new way.

But I strongly agree with Chris on one thing here - this is not what you get in those "Teach Children to Code" programs. Those will teach you how to become a frontend developer in a year and earn good money, which honestly doesn't require you to think at all. It's a trained-monkey level thing. They took what was supposed to be an idea about education and turned it into something that's about money and career.

I think Bret Victor did the best summary of why current "teach kids to code" movement is just total bullshit.

http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/

Second - modeling. I agree with the sentiment that it's modeling that's (one of) fundamental thing(s). But it can't just be any modeling. Because typical "modeling" of today is that diagram your chief marketer drew on a whiteboard that conveys exactly zero knowledge (or even negative knowledge, if you count in confusion it caused). Typical "modeling" gets you UML diagrams, which we all know are most useful as padding at the bottom of the trash can, so there's something to absorb coffee from the cup that you just have thrown away.

The modeling that programming is about is careful and very precise expression of concepts. It's like that saying goes - "if you want to really understand something, teach it to someone; but if you want to really, really comprehend it, teach a computer to do it". Computers are unforgiving - either you exactly understand what you're doing and can express it precisely, or it doesn't work. There's no room for error or hand-waving around difficult concepts that people do when explaining things to one another.

So modeling may be the new literacy, but this must be careful and precise modeling.

nickstefan122• 11 years ago

non trivial front end stuff does involve systems modeling in the sense mentioned in the article. Just saying ;)

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

Of course it does, as non-trivial anything development. It's just not what people are being taught, and more importantly - they're being taught things for a wrong reason. "Teach kids to code" was supposed to be about making them smarter, allowing them to think in ways they previously couldn't. Not about preparing them for a lucrative career.

TuringTest10• 11 years ago

This is all well and true for scientific modelling, where you want to achieve an exact depiction of how nature works. But for more social undertakes I believe that level of exactness is overkill and brings unnecessary complexity.

After all, society members have been able to collaborate in numerous projects that don't need that level of accuracy, well before (and after) the widespread adoption of scientific reasoning. Most social activities simply don't need such precision and can advance with an amount of ambiguity and implicit knowledge, with which a computer would choke.

In such environments, people could still benefit from modelling through computers in a way focused not in precision, but in semi-automation of routine tasks.

Where computer programs need that every possible case is taken into account in the model and handled with precission, a system that handled well the common cases and delegated outliers and exceptions to human supervision could greatly improve those social enterprises without requiring that those involved learn how to express their thoughts with scientific meticulousness.

Alas, modern programming languages are not adequate to support that semi-structured way to modelling, but I think we are closer than ever to build a tool that can allow end users to build domain-specific abstractions without learning to create imperative programs or learn how computers work internally - the ideas to make this happen are floating around with strength for some time.

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

This is all well and true for scientific modelling, where you want to achieve an exact depiction of how nature works. But for more social undertakes I believe that level of exactness is overkill and brings unnecessary complexity. (...) Most social activities simply don't need such precision and can advance with an amount of ambiguity and implicit knowledge, with which a computer would choke.

This reminds me of a common misconception that computers are about precision as opposed to ambiguity. It's not true - computers handle ambiguity well, but force you to be precise about what is ambiguous and in what way ;). We've invented probability theory to deal with uncertainity in a proper manner.

Of course, most social activities work fine with handwaving anything we're not sure or don't understand - but well, humans do have this skill and it's not going away. What programming does is it complements that skill with an ability to be precise about uncertainity when you need to.

Alas, modern programming languages are not adequate to support that semi-structured way to modelling, but I think we are closer than ever to build a tool that can allow end users to build domain-specific abstractions without learning to create imperative programs or learn how computers work internally - the ideas to make this happen are floating around with strength for some time.

I agree, though I don't think we can get there without teaching people the essence of programming. Syntax peculiarities don't really matter, but the basic ideas are so fundamental, they're probably more fundamental to reality than physics. I believe you need to have an intuitive grasp on computation to be effective even with that semi-structured modelling - because not everything we know from today's programming is working around machine-imposed constraints; some of it is actually touching the very fabric of reality.

collyw4• 11 years ago

But that's why we have Aglie and NoSQL. Modelling was just slowing us down. :)

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

But that's why we have Aglie and NoSQL. Thinking was just slowing us down. :)

FTFY ;).

nickstefan122• 11 years ago

There are a number of tools that already help us do this - from Matlab to Quartz Composer - but Excel is unquestionably the king. Through Excel we can model any system that we can represent as numbers on a grid, which it turns out, is a lot of them. We have modeled everything from entire businesses to markets to family vacations. Millions of people are able to use spreadsheets to model aspects of their lives and it could be argued that, outside of the Internet, it's the single most important tool available to us on a computer. It gains this power by providing a simple and intuitive set of tools for shaping just one material: a grid of numbers. If we want to work with more than that, however, we have to code.

The idea that the entire average joe population needs more than excel has never sounded quite right to me. Anything closer to "real" programming and I think we're asking people to devote too much of their time to something that looks like software developing. I Just honesty think not everyone has the demeanor to enjoy programming. It's a very introverted, abstract, high focus, and high patience endevour.

TuringTest10• 11 years ago

Indeed, Excel is close to perfect for the purpose of building data abstractions in an intuitive way. The only part I find lacking is for building behavior abstractions which allowed users to build semi-automated workflows by changing views of data on the fly; to change presentation, Excel still requires you change languages and resort to imperative programming in Visual Basic, much like Hypercard.

A tool that combined Excel's functional data-flow programming with Hypercard's representation of state (as a stack of panels that change depending on the execution of small attached functions) would IMHO provide a general programming tool for end users.

david9272• 11 years ago

If you have time, could you take a look at this project I'm working on? https://vimeo.com/107069470

I would relish feedback.

collyw4• 11 years ago

Excel is easy to model in an intuitive way, but it end up being very poor models that come out of it, as it is basically a two dimensional grid. So the first two dimensions you are modelling will come out well, but once you need to start adding extra information in, then you have color coding, new fonts, and all sort of hacks to overcome the limitations of excel, when in reality you ought to be using a proper database by that stage.

facepalm5• 11 years ago

Personally, I wish there was a "everybody should know how to design" movement. Then instead of coding tutorials I don't need, there would be tutorials for designing available. There are some articles about typography, but it seems very hard to learn graphics design in general (on your own).

I feel much more held back by my lack of design skills. And I think it's much more important to being successful in life. It starts with presenting yourself (design your CV, website, letters, mails, ideas, power point presentations).

But even if you want to create an internet startup: the backbone technology is pretty much interchangeable. Java/Ruby/badly strung together bash scripts/whatever. The visuals and UI matter much more.

hessenwolf• 11 years ago

I couldn't agree with you more. I have been working on trying to get some skills therein. I paste the notes from my personal expertise board.

Graphic Design:

Relationship

Transition

Layering

Principles of Design:

Repetition

Opposition: Excitement and tension. Too much is bad. Particularly thick and thin lines in logos.

Priority: The order of the items.

Position: Use a grid. Divide in twos and connect corners diagonally.

Attributes of Design:

Balance: Arrangements so that elements equal each other, not overpowering each other. Can balance objects with each other or whitespace with objects.

Emphasis and Contrast: too little is boring, too much irritating. Plain text with bold or underline in small quantities works.

Rhythm: regular movemet, reduce line spacing or tighten words to increase speed. You can increase the line height, but too much and the eye has trouble finding the next point. The rhythm should fade out, and not end abrubtly.

Position:

Grid Choices

http://www.troytempleman.com/2010/04/30/grids-in-graphic-des...

Rule of Thirds

Golden Ratio

Columns

Baseline Grid http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/five-simple-steps-to-de...

Start with a symmetric plus, and then use 1.414 ratios to create smaller sections with margins.

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

That's not what the "learn to code" movement was supposed to be about (though that's what it is about now). What you're suggesting now is again "how to get rich", but in the marketing version instead of webdev one ;). I get why learning how to sell yourself well is important for being (financially) successful, but it does not make you smarter, which was the original point.

facepalm5• 11 years ago

Ok I missed that - they seriously want everyone to learn to code because it would make them smarter? No offense, but I think that sounds so arrogant and misguided I am speechless (not meaning you, I mean the movement).

There are plenty of other human activities that also require and train intelligence. I would like to see some actual research on why programming supposedly is more effective in making people smart than other things.

And then personally I would say people should learn some basic maths before learning programming. That would help even more, for example to avoid financial breakdown.

I really thought the movement started because people saw so many "I became a billionaire by programming" stories in the media, and felt that without programming people would end up poor. But for example with design it is much easier to make money on the internet. Just throw together something nice about a current meme and sell a T-Shirt. I don't know how much work designing a T-Shirt is, but I am pretty sure it is less than coding a startup that makes money. Especially, since for a website or app that makes money you'll also need good design, so it is a strict subset of "sell a T-Shirt".

WA• 11 years ago

There are 500 pages à 15 tutorials on tutsplus about "design":

http://tutsplus.com/tutorials/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search%5...

facepalm5• 11 years ago

Thanks, I'll check them out.

WickyNilliams• 11 years ago

Can recommend these two books: The Design of Everyday Things and The Non-Designer's Design Book.

TDoET will teach you about usability and designing for that. TNDDB will give you a vocabulary for design (much like design patterns give a common vocabulary for code problems, this does for design IMO).

facepalm5• 11 years ago

Thanks. I already have the second one and it's great. But it doesn't make me a designer.

I'd like a course like the Coursera MOOCs that walks me through the steps (most importantly, makes me practice with homework on a regular schedule). Also the mundane details - what tools to use, for example (software, hardware).

To be fair I think there was actually a MOOC by the author of The Design of Everyday Things. I was signed up, but ended up not having the time :-(

Terr_• 11 years ago

"No... but it might be the new numeracy."

Especially with all the tools people have to do raw calculations for them (hardware or software calculators, spreadsheet, equation solvers) the coding "benefit for people who won't continue it professionally" is similar to math education.

In both cases, the takeaway involves establishing certain critical-thinking skills, for creating mental models of a real or desired thing, trying to break that model down into solvable chunks, recognizing chunks you already know how to solve, and building upwards again.

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

Indeed. You don't learn arithmetics to do the work calculators are better suited for, you learn it to understand the concept of quantities and their behaviour. You don't learn calculus to solve integrals by hand, you do it to get a feel of how dynamic and interdependent systems behave. And similarly, the takeaway from general programming education should be additional mental tools enabling you to think new thoughts and understand all kinds of systems better.

cm21874• 11 years ago

I think computer science has more to do with engineering than science. Like learning Latin, learning computer science has some side benefits in term of learning rigor, logic, etc. But that should not be a primary motivation.

noelwelsh2• 11 years ago

The piece argues that "[c]oding, like writing, is a mechanical act". It's certainly not the intent of the learn to code movement to teach typing skills! This statement seems to grossly misrepresent what people mean when they say "learn to code".

To learn to code is to learn to model systems. Programs are built from components -- abstractions -- and good programmers know a wide variety of abstractions and understand how to combine them to achieve the desired effect. A good program is one that accurately models the phenomena of interest, whether that phenomena is something as simple as "display the user's profile" or a complex simulation like a game.

Now I would agree that many of the current curriculums are terrible, and teach no great insight into modelling. But that is the fault of the curriculum designers -- often people who have neither great experience in teaching or in programming. That doesn't mean there isn't good work being done, such as the Program by Design team (http://www.programbydesign.org/).

In short, I think the blog post builds a straw man argument. I agree it absolutely belts crap out of that straw man, but that is beside the point.

puranjay3• 11 years ago

English major here. I'm currently learning how to code as part of a bootcamp called (surprise surprise) "Coding is the New Literacy".

One of the things this program hammers in early is fundamental programming principles like OOP. A lot of MOOCs skirt around these topics, forcing you to 'build' non-functional apps first. I've taken those courses and learned nothing of real value.

This program, where I've been forced to learn algorithms, OOP, etc. has been of much higher value. It's been harder, but I feel like I'm actually learning the fundamental principles of programming.

I'll echo your sentiments: to learn how to program is to learn how to model systems.

acron0• 11 years ago

I am trying to read between the lines of your comment and I _think_ you get this but I'm going to spell it out anyway:

"...fundamental programming principles like OOP."

The key word here is "like". OOP is actually falling out of favor as a successful way to express models. Make sure you investigate alternatives to OOP (functional, procedural etc). As a graduate of OOP myself, it's interesting and exciting to approach different paradigms. Experience tells me that the best practices obsess over what things "do" rather than what things "are" (which is a fluffy concept at best).

Anyway, tit for tat, YMMV. Glad you're doing something though.

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

One of the things this program hammers in early is fundamental programming principles like OOP

OOP is not a fundamental programming principle. Its a recently popular programming paradigm. The idea that OOP is a fundamental programming principle is a harmful concept to internalize (though lots of programmers trained in the last ~20-25 years have internalized it.)

peterfirefly• 11 years ago

fundamental programming principles like OOP

Learn you a Haskell for great good instead.

Functions and types are fundamental. OOP not so much. Computation is fundamental, state not so much. Higher-order functions are not quite fundamental (depending on your point of view) but pretty close.

TuringTest10• 11 years ago

  This means we needn't fully specify a system to get
  started, we can simply craft new pieces as we go. We end 
  up exploring the system as we create it and don't have to 
  get a "complete" model to gain value.

This is an essential part of the article, and why the author has a valid point.

The problem with most current approaches to programming is that they don't provide good support for this partial, incremental way to build models - either your abstractions are fully developed, or they don't work at all and the program crashes during execution; there is no middle ground.

Professional developers eventually learn how to build systems incrementally through testing (by building placeholders for yet-to-build components) and debugging (by exploring how the program behaves under different inputs), but these tools are complex and not really part of the programming language, and thus not adequate for basic literacy.

Excel and Hypercard fall out of this requirement for perfect modelling, allowing partial execution of parts of the program, and intermixing data with the code that works on it, lowering the abstraction barrier; thus these tools work better for exploratory modelling than conventional programming languages, which keep data and commands wholly separate and require an exact specification to work.

They have shortcomings, but the article is right that a tool for the wide public needs to reduce the level of formalism required to build models, and that "the computer revolution" based on that "lightweight modelling" approach has yet to come. There is an emerging movement for "live programming" that has created environments closer to that approach. This is still in its early stages, though we think we're finally close to achieve that vision.

*Edit: format

dtrain3000• 11 years ago

Yes. And you're talking about design, in the sense that modeling is a form of design, and also the design of computers and the supporting OS's we have today.

To put the above into perspective, imagine how you would design the entire computing environment for the common man if you could start over and design it from scratch.

Much of the literacy barrier is due to the fact that our systems are hangovers from 25 or 50 years ago.

logicallee• 11 years ago

In front of you is an apparatus that can do a trillion operations for you in the time it takes your microwave to bring a cup of water to a boil.[1]

But whereas entering how long you want your microwave to heat its contents is trivial, programming your CPU and GPU to do anything at all makes you about as qualified as someone who holds an undergraduate degree in the field of computing[2]. Like a priest at a time when hardly anyone could read and write, and being lettered itself was a distinction, anyone who can get their computer to do anything at all (i.e. to program it) has a rarified ability.

Why is the analogy with literacy a good one: because you must communicate your intentions to the computer in writing. That is how you program. Yes, we have frameworks and models and API's and all sorts of helpful protocols and formulae to help you communicate with your PC and give you a mental framework.

But at the end of the day, you are asking a machine to do something. And you're doing so in writing. The rest is literally formalities.

[1] assuming dual-core desktop CPU stepping up to 2.7 GHz and mobile-class GPU or better; iPad 4 or iPhone 5S GPU capable of 76 GLFOPS or better; 700 watt microwave capable of boiling 1 cup of water in 1 minute and 30 seconds.

[2] CS undergraduate degree does not guarantee that a candidate can program their PC.

fizixer2• 11 years ago

- Coding is not the new literacy.

- Neither is modeling.

- Neither is externalizing mental models or whatever.

It's not the human obligation to become more and more creative and resourceful, when less creative activities become less and less valuable, and fail to help earn a living.

The author of this article claims that people are missing the point. He's right. But he's missing the point as well, or at least arriving at a very wrong conclusion.

We're at a cusp of a very very strange era. This is the era where humans, and the capacity of human intellect, is approaching obsolescence. And the solution is not to train everyone to become like Einstein or, in this case, Knuth, or Steele, or Torvalds, or whatever.

"There can only be so many people in the entertainment industry" as Aubrey de Grey puts it.

Similarly, there can only be so many people in the "coding industry".

These people are missing a key property of coding: Coding eats itself! Or as Andreessen puts it "Software is eating the world". Meaning, coding by virtue of it happening, ends up automating aspects of itself, to the point where, a small kernel of information processing is able to carry out vast amounts of informational activity, as opposed to requiring a vast number of coders as those not familiar with coding tend to believe.

And this trend of automation will keep on increasing, giving rise to more and more serious technological unemployment, all the way to the logical conclusion of technological singularity. The sooner the "people in charge" realize this bitter truth, the better it would be for everyone.

ObviousScience• 11 years ago

You admit that computer and software are eating the world, but come to the conclusion that it's useless to teach people to speak to them at a basic level.

I'm not sure I follow your argument.

We don't teach literacy because we expect people to be professional writers, but rather, that because the written word is a basic means of communicating with each other and the world around them -- we're having this very discussion through the power of literacy, even.

In what way do you think people advocating teaching programming mean in any other sense?

When I advocate teaching programming to people, I don't envision a world full of software developers, I imagine a world full of slightly more informed software users. People who can interact with the Googles of the world by writing a sentence (or even a Boolean expression!) using correct logic or who can write a small Javascript snippet to automate a simple task like highlighting certain things on a webpage or who can write a simple Python script to get a rough approximation about how some numbers work.

Further, having even a tiny basis in computers - like the level of mathematics we teach in high school (on average) - gives me a basis as a professional to explain how things like Facebook work in a way that I can't now. It's much in a similar way to how once people know what a variable and a function is, I can explain more advanced math concepts using those ideas -- in a way that I couldn't if I had to start at the very beginning with "this is a number".

So again, I'm not sure I follow your argument: if software is eating the world, why wouldn't we teach people to speak basic software in addition to basic spoken language?

fizixer2• 11 years ago

You seem to be coming from the opposing view of that of the article, that coding 'is' the new literacy. I was more challenging the article's claim that modeling is the new literacy, which I think isn't.

As to whether coding is the new literacy or not, I'd say we really need to ask what is the purpose of education. If the purpose of education is enlightenment, then yes, a child should learn how to code, but also how to paint, how to play a musical instrument, and so on and so forth. But then some children have the aptitude for one thing, some for another thing.

But I think the purpose of education as a means of making the individual economically viable is becoming more and more futile with increased automation. (In this regard I strongly adhere to the views expressed in the video 'Humans Need Not Apply' by CGPGrey[1], and TED talks by Jeremy Howard[2], Erik Brynjolfsson[3], Andrew McAfee[4]).

As to the need for coding so that humans could interact with machines, I think in the long run, this is also going to progress to the point where the machine would be aware of the abilities of the human it's dealing with and make it easy for the human to interact with itself. (EDIT 1: I should also add that interacting with machines is already happening at a massive scale when everyone has a smartphone in their back pocket. And yet when the software goes wrong, the inability of an average user to fix it is not the result of that user not being coding literate, but rather the insurmountable complexity of the code behind the easy-to-use interface, even if we ignore the hidden nature of proprietary codes).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4kyRyKyOpo

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sod-eJBf9Y0

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXQrbxD9_Ng

dschiptsov2• 11 years ago

"modeling" is different.) If we think about oversimplified, or too abstract, disconnected form reality models and especially those probabilistic models, when they are trying to infer the next immediate outcome based on the probability distributions of from the past (which is completely wrong - all you could infer form probability distributions is what could happen on average), then, it is a total disaster. Look at these loses in finance and profound failures in humanities.

Models has to be "just right", like every molecular arrangement in the Nature.

But the skill of "extracting correct models from some aspects of reality" is really important.

lohengramm2• 11 years ago

All this discussion remembers me of Brian Kernighan [1] mentioning that Dennis Ritchie was also a good writer (besides a good programmer). Also, Jamie Zawinski (jwz), somewhere in the book Coders at Work [2], while questioned by the author, points out a feeling of mental connection between programming and writing.

I am with those guys in the sense that programming is just like writing anything else. Even in the most trivial cases, you actually think (or could have done it) before putting down a word or two. And you often come back to erase and make it better. So, teaching how to program is also teach how to "build models".

[1] http://youtu.be/uxtKwJZbYr0 [2] http://www.codersatwork.com/

seanmcdirmid5• 11 years ago

Writing is much more difficult than programming. With programming, I just have to get the program to work, the computer checks my BS by not doing the right thing; I can't lie to it. With writing, I can easily delude myself and it takes extra mental effort or external review to check prose.

lohengramm2• 11 years ago

You can use the computer to check whether you are doing the right thing by trying it out, but the computer will not tell you whether your program is organized in the best possible way, whether it is to be considered beautiful or not, or even, sometimes, whether it is efficient enough. To achieve all these points you really have to think, and it is just like building anything else, from texts to mechanical devices.

Of course, its not abstract modeling; there is a necessary amount of technical knowledge to it, but so there is with anything else.

Nursie• 11 years ago

The world runs on software now.

Gaining a basic insight into what's going on, at a relatively early age, is important if we want people to gain an understanding of the world around them. Not everyone has to become an expert, but a modern education system at least ought to introduce people to it.

ntoshev• 11 years ago

The author explained a very useful analogy (reading : comprehension = writing : composition = coding : modelling) but didn't push it as far as he should. The important thing about coding as modelling is that the results are not just external to the author's head, they are formal models that automatically infer or do things. The other way to do that - in one's head and via his actions - simply doesn't scale beyond a point. Historically the ways people scale such models are human organisations. That's why IT is so exciting today: not only it helps an individual think, it helps groups organize at scale that wasn't practical before because of the friction inherent in implementing formal models in people's heads.

tyrfing• 11 years ago

I think it's something a bit more basic - logic. Learning programming teaches logic, because the computer will find every logical shortcoming in what you tried to express.

Natural language is the bread and butter of our every day existence, and it is a veritable swiss cheese of logic. Most people won't hear your argument and notice the unfounded assumption that destroys the whole thing, but a compiler will. Most people won't notice if you leave some of what you say implicit, but your compiler will.

Something I've noticed over the years is that people, in general, are just not good at logic. Very few things teach it, the few that explicitly cover it like symbolic and formal logic classes are arcane, scary corners of the educational system. Logic doesn't win arguments, it doesn't get you laid, it generally doesn't help you interact with other people. It does teach you to think, but like deodorant, nobody knows they need it until they already have it.

So, start small. Teach logic, teach people to think, teach them the very fundamental underpinnings of programming. Programming is then just another way for people to express what they already know, like learning a foreign language rather than learning language in the first place.

I think most people saying "teach them to program!", at least the ones I've seen calling out the "it teaches you a new way to think" part, actually mean logic in general.

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

I personally don't mean just logic when advocating that programming "teaches you a new way to think". Sure, there's logic. There's a skill of very precise and clear thinking on multiple levels of abstraction simultanously that you need to write code that works. But there is more!

There's that feeling and understanding of basic units of computation. And I mean computation in the general, mathematical sense. Then there's the ability to express your will in terms of those computation units. And understanding how computation transforms information on an elemental level.

This gives you new abilities - like, being able to automate a repetitive process. Or understanding how one thing can influence another via information. Or understanding what is feasible and what not based on computational complexity.

For instance, it's hard to explain to non-programmers (and even some programmers!) just how much you can infer from information they leave on Facebook - because most people lack the neccessary mental models to even talk about it. And having them is increasingly important in comprehending the technological world around us.

collyw4• 11 years ago

I think some people learn to think in a deeper more abstract way but many don't.

My team leader always describes database results like an imperative program "if it has this show do this". I have to translate that into "return the set where this happens". We will debate database schemas, and I can see that one version is essentially a normalized version of the other option and a join will transform it into the same table .

I think there are plenty of programmers who reach a basic level of understanding and no more. The one years experience 10 times type guy.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

That's really an argument for teaching critical thinking, verbal reasoning, social presentation, and rhetoric, all of which are more useful in the real world than $programming_language, formal logic, or analytical modelling.

The humanities have been hacking human minds for millennia. They've become so good at it it's possible to hack the beliefs of entire populations so subtly those populations don't notice they're being... modified.

This might be more of an issue than knowing what xor does, or how to search a binary tree.

people, in general, are just not good at logic.

No, people aren't. That's because people's brains are story machines, selected by evolution to work on quick-and-plausible heuristic arguments based on narrative relationships, and not on deep research and formal abstraction.

I wouldn't be surprised if across the population as a whole, only some percentage - less than half, more than a third, maybe - is capable of non-trivial formal logic at all.

Most people seem far more swayed and interested in by simple stories with an emotional punchline. The idea that you even can do formal modelling of the future is personally unfamiliar to them.

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

No, people aren't. That's because people's brains are story machines, selected by evolution to work on quick-and-plausible heuristic arguments based on narrative relationships, and not on deep research and formal abstraction.

That, and the fact that logic itself is not the right tool to work with messy reality - probability theory is. And heuristics are part of this when probabilistic models meet limited computational resources and time constraints (you can't think too long about what's that yellow striped thing in the bushes, because you'll get eaten by it).

NobleLie2• 11 years ago

The humanities have been hacking human minds for millennia. They've become so good at it it's possible to hack the beliefs of entire populations so subtly those populations don't notice they're being... modified.

I had to chime in here and congratulate you on your fine explanation of the concept Plato deemed the Noble Lie. I don't want to assume you know of its but I'll go ahead and do so anyway, since you seem the type.

For others, it's truly fascinating : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie

Humans so readily eat them for breakfast, lunch, dinner and in our dreams.

Not to say I am such a grand detective at the age of 23, but I feel as if the building software has taught me (and will continue to teach me,) many valuable logical lessons, which help me to methodically deconstruct things beyond programming (stories, my beliefs, other people's beliefs.) This would make sense since usual we build software by translating those things (stories and beliefs) into the fractal complexity necessary to achieve a real solution.

I can't think of any better substitution than teaching logic through programming since I happen to agree with one of the parents in that pure logic in philosophy is slightly harder to pin down concretely for younger minds. They are also less apt to pick up on and find existential value in philosophy.

In other words, I'm completely for programming literacy in middle, and high school. Especially for it's ineffectiveness with logic, but also to since they are just beginning to realize the complex programs in their very own mind (built by themselves... or others.) I'd want them (and everyone) to know how to deconstruct and find roots, reasons, and rationale.

sergiosgc• 11 years ago

People often confuse the mechanical learning of reading and writing, with the more advanced learning of how to write properly and how to analyze texts. Learning to write properly, learning to lay out one's argument, or story, in a solid, comprehensible and fun to read way is difficult. The learning process actually changes the student thought process, making it more structured and forcing a third-person view of the text.

The same actually applies to programming. The mechanical task of programming isn't very difficult, and can be taught in a few dozen hours. The thought process that leads to solid programs, though, is akin to proper writing. It is hard, requires an even more structured approach to defining solutions, and actually changes one's approach to modelling reality in general.

If we believe that a formal view of the world is a necessary skill (which I do), then teaching programming is as useful as teaching good writing. Note that I don't mean the basic skill of writing code, but the skill that is similar to good writing. Distinguishing the two is necessary for discussion. We can call it programming and software engineering, or programming and Programming (with a capital P), or something else. The rote task and the modelling task lead to different discussion paths.

icebraining• 11 years ago

I actually disagree. People have a pretty good grasp of basic logic. The issue is that when we say "computers are logical", what we really mean is that you need to treat computers like someone who is missing important parts of their brain.

People are used to interact with other entities that can perform advanced logical inferences, deductions, etc in an intuitive way. They are at a loss when they're forced to dumb it down to "talk" to someone who needs to be told not to crash into the wall when being told to walk in a certain direction.

Worse still, when people do understand that computers are really dumb, but actually good at following orders when you treat them like a mentally challenged toddler, they get stuck again when even that fails; when they encounter application after application that does not operate in any logical sense, because they aren't programmed by other computers, but by lazy/dumb/stressed/ignorant programmers like me.

The best quote I read on this comes from this essay: http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

"The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad."

dasboth3• 11 years ago

If you're using logic that assumes the entity you're interacting with "can perform advanced logical inferences, deductions, etc." but don't understand how to dumb it down for a computer, does that not mean that somewhere you don't have a grasp of something? What is that something, is it logic? I'm playing devil's advocate more than anything but I think being able to tell a computer step by step what to do requires logic, albeit perhaps a specific type of logic.

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

This. The whole essay you linked is golden.

People have good grasp in logic, but they totally underestimate the amount of computation our brains do in the background when communicating. A lot of information is contained in our shared cultular upbringing, education, social norms and internal brain mechanisms. Computers don't have any of that. Even as I write this comment, 99% of information required to comprehend it is not in the text - is in the shared context everyone has in their heads already.

cabalamat2• 11 years ago

People have a pretty good grasp of basic logic.

I disagree. Consider that most people fail the Wason test, unless it is being explained using a scenario involving cheating, when they pass.

rayiner• 11 years ago

This essay is priceless:

Would you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on the internet but didn't.

skywhopper• 11 years ago

A compiler can only catch syntax errors (ie grammar). But just as a well-written essay can be based on false-premises, so a syntactically correct program can be full of bugs, particularly if the programmer had a faulty idea of what the problem was to begin with.

Pure logic can only work correctly with reasonable premises. But it can't provide us with those premises. We can only construct, refine, and share those through natural language.

To get back to the point of the OP, I think the underlying assumption that systematic modelling is the new literacy only makes sense if we assume the "old" literacy. In other words, the ability to model the real world only works if we can actually understand and communicate about that real world outside the models. Without the underlying meaning, the model is just a toy.

_asummers• 11 years ago

Pure logic can only work correctly with reasonable premises. But it can't provide us with those premises. We can only construct, refine, and share those through natural language.

Have you ever looked into formal verification or assisted theorem provers? There's a branch of math called "constructive mathematics" that utilizes them where formerly natural language would have been used, in an attempt to codify them and get productivity gains.

virmundi• 11 years ago

Why teach these things with programming? Historically we, the west, have taught these things with philosophy. That's how we went from tribalism to democracy. Why not teach with philosophy?

I know that we live in a technical world, but no matter what, we live in a philosophical world. Everyone deals with philosophy (either reflective or forced upon them) daily. How we work with each other might be via a keyboard and mouse, by why we work with each other is philosophical. It would be better to teach various systems of thought, allow a dialectic to occur, and get a better, more informed citizen.

TeMPOraL19• 11 years ago

Because philosophy is too imprecise. When you dig down to the most fundamental concepts of CS you end up in what is usually considered the territory of philosophers, only with a better mental toolkit to explore it.

There is an interesting paper by Scott Aaronson about the intersection of those two disciplines and how the more CS-y approach can help solve philosophical problems:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf.

dasboth3• 11 years ago

I agree, this is actually more general than programming. Philosophy opens new doors for people, there's no reason to limit that to something that's still quite niche among the general population.

cabalamat2• 11 years ago

Why teach these things with programming?

Because you can't bullshit a computer. It therefore enforces rigour.

fnordfnordfnord3• 11 years ago

Why not teach with philosophy?

That sounds great but almost nobody teaches philosophy to children right now, and that does not seem likely to change in the near future. Our utilitarian ideas about education (you know, workforce training) make it easier to support teaching of subjects that are more directly relate-able to work.

jimbokun3• 11 years ago

Logicians like Turing, Church, and Gödel gave us computers.

So I don't think there is any sharp distinction between programming and what logicians do. And I think it's clear that Turing (for example) was very excited about the possibilities of furthering his studies with actual physical computers he could program, given his work on Engima.

So it may be programming is one of the best tools we have for teaching logic, and one could make a good argument many of the great logicians in history would agree.

(Note my emphasis on "logician", as there are many other kinds of philosophy for which computers aren't as obviously helpful, as they are for learning logic and logical thinking.)

mkr-hn• 11 years ago

I've seen enough programmers with poor logic to think it's not an ideal way to teach logic.

dschiptsov2• 11 years ago

Oh, this thread again.)

There is almost no relation between knowing a language (vocabulary and grammar) and the ability to write, say, 1984 or Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It requires a different set of skills (explained, btw, in the Pirsig's book).

The "new literacy" is, basically, a "model extraction" - ability to understand the principles form the emerged phenomena on the go. It is about learning new skills on the go - you need to perform some data analysis - well, just pick up the required skills (it is not that hard, by the way).

Again, coding is not programming. These two are different skills. Programming is an engineering discipline. Coding is a translation skill. To be a translator one have to know the languages, but this is not nearly enough to be a writer (an inventor). A typist, who is literate enough to be able to make a carbon copy of someone's else fine poetry is usually incapable to write her own (neither are the guys who study literature).

To put it another way - "to know C" is not enough to write nginx or redis. It is not about languages (well, almost - a language that fits the task best is a requirement), the way a "good idea" could be expressed in any language.

calinet6• 11 years ago

+1 for reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on this topic. He delves into great depth on the intersection of technology and humanity and the way people look at both. It is incredibly thought provoking.

cm21874• 11 years ago

I think that coding is the last chapter of a computer litteracy education.

Kids should learn to: - type with a keyboard - understand how a computer works: cpu, ram, disks, etc - understand softwares, OS, security - understand internet, html, ssl certificates - use office/office style softwares - basic programming skills in an easy language

Computers are here to stay and will be an everyday technology like cars and electricity. Kids have to learn thermodynamics and electricity at school not because they will all become physicists or engineers, but because they need a basic understanding of what they will be exposed to their whole life.

patsplat• 11 years ago

It's the new middle management.

itsbits• 11 years ago

There are lot of guys who don't code. And there are lot of guys who code but dont exactly know what are they coding. If you remove all these combinations, Coding literacy is very less.

parasubvert• 11 years ago

Interesting. These sorts of headlines bug me, in that they reject computation itself as a novel medium of expression or externalizations of mental models.

I think modeling is very important, but Chris seems confused on how to reason about education. The core message, that we want children with higher levels of cognition than mere factual knowledge, is good, but rather obvious. His core conclusion that we don't want a generation of people caring about code has nothing to do with this, and is very misguided. This basically rejects computation as an expressive medium outright in favor of the usual writing and mathematics ("writers and accountants"), rather than recognizing computation's new role in society and new jobs that leverage it (business analyst with his Excel macros, quantitative analyst or data scientist with his combination of statistics and scripting, software engineers, test engineers, architects).

It's almost like Chris took Bloom's taxonomy (not actually a taxonomy, but useful) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_taxonomy of cognition and decided that the foundational element - knowledge - basic reading, writing, coding, math, and facts - is irrelevant. This is not irrelevant, it is the foundation on which we build comprehension, then application, then analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. This he calls specification, exploration, validation, and debugging. Good luck teaching someone how to apply a model, let along synthesize one, when they can't do the basics of expression. This gets into the philosophy of education, and perhaps this article is just a reflection of the current trend away from rote learning, but this is an active debate, not settled science. This trend may lead to some bizarre outcomes: I see 15 year olds that can't read a wall clock or understand basic techniques around fractions, though they can describe and do basic reasoning about them.

Secondly, I believe coding itself is a fundamentally new area of knowledge, and every debate about "coding is the new literacy" really comes down to whether you believe this or reject it. Rather than convince you, all I can do is quote from the preface of SICP http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html, one of the great examples of computing pedagogy we have:

'Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that "computer science" is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "what is." Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "how to."'

Yes, modeling is important - it's a a higher level of cognitive reasoning. We still should teach kids to code.

humbertomn• 11 years ago

Not everyone needs to be coding since they are 10 and end end up as a top software engineer in some hot tech startup.

But I definitely agree that basic programming and database skills would be beneficial to almost everyone following any professional career.

Take my mom as an example: she's a very skilled doctor working with kidney transplant in Brazil. There are lots of software programs written to help them, but she's always ahead of time and trying to do some magic with the massive data she has access to, playing with graphs and spreadsheets.... and I sometimes (little time) help her to put some little tool up..

I can only imagine where her ideas would be if she had basic programming skills...

thebouv• 11 years ago

Improving the nation's overall STEM skills is more important than just trying to focus on programming. Programming is not the hard part -- planning, deducing, structuring, hypothesizing, analyzing and so on.

Programming is just one way to apply those skills.

nightski• 11 years ago

Sure but any STEM major is going to be interacting with computers to a significant degree. It helps significantly to understand them. Maybe not to the same level as a developer on HN, but at least to know how software works and the fundamentals of programming/controlling the machine.

stefanix• 11 years ago

Good article. I am not sure the difference between modeling and coding/programming needs to be made as there is not really any significant coding without modeling.

It's a bit like saying pilots are airplane takeoff/landing operators because enroute flying is the trivial part.

Coding is not the new literacy

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