Will the Push for Coding Lead to ‘Technical Ghettos’?

I know the reasons for teaching Java...but I really wish that when a coding curriculum is decided upon, we go to something as close to the *nix-like shell as possible. I&#x27;m teaching Python to non-CS college students right now, and it never fails to amaze me how many times I have to remind them that we&#x27;re dealing with text and textfiles, whether it&#x27;s web scraping or counting words in Shakespeare or accessing an API. If they have any doubt what they just opened and read into memory, or wrote to disk, just switch over to the GUI (i.e. Finder on OS X) and inspect the file the &quot;old fashioned way&quot;. The students that get it are the ones who can use programming on a casual basis...I don&#x27;t attempt to teach the basics of comsci theory, but if someone can see that a task is repeatable and abstractable into a for-loop, and then apply that to something &quot;real-world&quot;, even if it&#x27;s just something like sending or collecting tweets, or managing photos...that to me is what students in a general curriculum should be learning: that the power of programming is the ability to control a computer at the granular level that you need to do exactly what you plan for. Not just learning how to push buttons on an interface designed for general consumption.<p>The other stuff...algorithmic efficiency, recursion, design...can come later, and are much easier to teach after you&#x27;ve appreciated the potential of computing and computational thinking.

Maybe we shouldn&#x27;t teach people how to write, as they may grow up to write trite race baiting articles.<p>I was fortunate to have an uncle in IT who gifted me hand me down IBM PC hardware that my parents could not afford in the 80s. I was making more money in high school with stuff I was able to self teach than many of my &quot;privleged&quot; relatives in real adult jobs.<p>These coding initiatives are great, as they introduce kids to a whole new world of inspiration and discovery.

Is it just me, or was the entire &quot;question&quot; in the article irrelevant? Like, yes just &quot;learning to code&quot; doesn&#x27;t make you a good programmer. But just &quot;learning to write&quot; doesn&#x27;t make you a good author either. You have to get an introduction and basic skills somewhere, even if most people will never go on to develop or profit from those skills.

I don&#x27;t get the complaint that teaching Java and JavaScript puts them on the bottom rung. You have to learn on some programming language and those are as good as any, though starting on Java sounds painful.

<i>&gt; Offering a glimpse into the not-too-distant future, [Joseph Sweeney] describes a day when... artificial-intelligence system will build the app... Coding might then be nearly obsolete</i><p>It&#x27;s always cute to hear school administrators (or any non-technical policy types) predict the future based upon superficial understanding of the underlying science and technology.<p>Code synthesis for fully specified and very simple programs is still considered a hard problem. Automating the entire software and product design process is fully AI hard.

Could this also be confused with a less condescending term - like Anil Dash&#x27;s concept of &quot;blue collar programmer&quot;? (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;anildash.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-blue-collar-coder.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;anildash.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-blue-collar-coder.html</a> )<p>(Or Reginald Braythewathe&#x27;s term of &quot; Clerical engineering work&quot; )

I usually try to temper my judgments on these sorts of articles, but this is patently ridiculous.<p>Is it the police and prison systems that are endangering another generation of black and brown youth? Is it the lack of fresh, organic food in inner-cities? Maybe it&#x27;s the fact that black and brown parents have, at a disgustingly disproportionate rate, been taken away from their families for possession of plants and chemicals that are likely to be legal soon anyway?<p>No, no, it&#x27;s not that stuff. It&#x27;s the fact that kids are learning Java and Javascript instead of Python and Go and Rust.

&gt; Kamau Bobb, the program director in computer-science education at NSF and Brown’s colleague, notes that the dominant argument in support of youth of color learning to code is to “get a good job”—creating a stratified system where students from racial and ethnic groups, and lower socioeconomic backgrounds, are prepped for work as service technicians and helpdesk agents<p>How does learning to code prep one for work as a service technician or helpdesk agent?

Sounds more to me like a bunch of computer science professors trying to market 4 year degrees and 10s (or 100s) of thousands of dollars in debt to lower income African Americans, with questionable benefits in terms of employment outcomes.

Most intern resumes that I&#x27;ve seen recently have Java, Python, and Javascript on them. A few add C&#x2F;C++ to those. I&#x27;ve only seen one with anything approaching a functional language (OCaml).<p>Personally I think Python, Java, or Javascript are good places to start coding. Python has the slight edge because there are a lot of good educational kits (Raspberry Pi as an example) that really make learning to code fun although the whole 2.x&#x2F;3.x mess muddies the water a bit.<p>I think once the tooling gets a little bit better then Haskell could easily be added to that list. It&#x27;s close but not quite there today.

I think this push for coding thing is great.<p>I see being able to code as a thing like literacy, either you have it or you don&#x27;t, and, if you don&#x27;t have it, then you are going to be held back and not reach your own potential. In the workplace I see a lot of people using 1990&#x27;s tools like Excel to create &#x27;reports&#x27; of some sort, where the data in them is as good as dead. Meanwhile, those of us that can do a database join or two and get the results in some type of web page (or text file) don&#x27;t have to keep creating the same &#x27;reports&#x27;. The computer just does it thereafter.<p>Companies that used to have a web page (and not much more) are now using online tools for business, whether that is getting stuff out the door, handling customer service, doing business intelligence things, in fact almost everything gets touched on by this &#x27;web&#x27; way of working. Doing things in legacy tools (Excel spreadsheets, Word docs) just does not cut it anymore, things now get done in a web-style way with some backend processes bespoke to the given business smoothing things along. &#x27;Let&#x27;s go back to doing everything in Excel&#x27; is the new &#x27;let&#x27;s go back to doing everything on paper&#x27;.<p>Even if one is not proficient at coding it is still important to be able to work with those that are, to be able to describe processes in a way that can be &#x27;automated&#x27; to some extent, a &#x27;systems approach&#x27; rather than hand-me-down ways of working.<p>This automation does not necessarily put people out of work, it empowers people to be able to do their actual work without the tedium of repetitive tasks. They can be more customer focused, do better &#x27;business intelligence&#x27; or keep better tabs on getting stuff out the door.<p>There was a revolution in the 1990&#x27;s when Word came along and replaced Wordperfect. Suddenly people could type their own letters and memos, they did not need to dictate to a secretary. Oddly nobody has gone back to the &#x27;Wordperfect&#x27; ways of working. Code (particularly on the web, whether front or backend) is like that, a game changer, and I want to see people coding, not necessarily to do some SF next-unicorn thing but just to be able to be participant in regular SME businesses.

I don&#x27;t have a CS degree, let alone a bachelor&#x27;s degree (I have a couple of associates unrelated to my career). I&#x27;m principally self-taught, and while I occasionally see gaps in my knowledge, I perform at a very high level: I&#x27;ve been a tech editor on major publisher titles, run a user group, spoken at conferences, and my current role is essentially CTO. I presume my technical education is similar to someone learning just the job.<p>Counterpoints: I always excelled at math, and while I did grow up very poor, I am a white male.

The article says over and over that learning to code is not CS. I fully agree but then it goes on to imply that CS is really about problem solving skills which is also inaccurate. CS is fundamentally about data structures and algorithms and it branches off from there into many subtopics. People often forget about the S in CS and mentally substitute a T for technology. Arguably most employers these days really want software engineers not computer scientists anyway.

Maybe the student has an inspiration for a business based on observations of their friends, or to solve a business problem their parents have, and just needs to learn enough to write an app to test out their hypothesis. Needing to hire a developer to test even the simplest ideas presents a very high barrier to entry.<p>If someone can code even a little bit, it really opens lots of opportunities, even without data structures, algorithms, and the rest of the computer science curriculum.

You dont need phd in mathematics to be a good software developer.

Bottom rung is still 60k<p>Which is much higher than most Americans. You&#x27;d be in your tech ghetto making more than your friends who went to a 4 year.

Make &#x27;em learn COBOL!

&gt; Coding is one piece of computational literacy<p>Literacy is the wrong word to use here. It doesn&#x27;t work to compare English literacy with this sort of thing.<p>English literacy in school is gained by a lot of practice. Writing, even if it&#x27;s texting friends, is something you do daily and throughout the day. The written language is in the same language (though there is some transformation involved in turning words in the brain to symbols on paper) in which you think and speak.<p>Doing something like computer programming is far different. You won&#x27;t get daily practice just by going through the norms of life. Even pushing yourself to getting daily practice won&#x27;t happen if you don&#x27;t have something on your plate which is interesting. People are lazy by default and just opening an editor can be too much effort. I procrastinate bad enough on paid projects, let alone things nobody is expecting me to do.<p>Just because people can read, doesn&#x27;t mean they pick up books to better themselves. People would much rather be spoon-fed entertainment through TV.<p>I don&#x27;t see the point of learning to code beyond having some familiarity with it. For this to be a useful skill you have to put a huge effort into keeping up with it. Learning a different language is a huge barrier (not difficult, but for surpasses the point of which most people are willing to go.)<p>Jobs aren&#x27;t easy to land. There is no equivalent to manufacturing in tech which can lead to an army of workers being employed. The tech rabbit hole grows deeper each day as we add more tools and specialty areas in which we need to be familiar with. Areas such as wrangling data has a daunting list of pre-reqs and I imagine this will be a trend moving forward (programming paired with knowledge of the domain you are building software for.)o<p>The sad fact is that technical knowledge doesn&#x27;t take down the issues which data shows to be a problem with people in ghettos.<p>People who live in a ghetto have a hard time moving. A life of poverty creates huge issues which people who don&#x27;t live in poverty don&#x27;t understand. It&#x27;s called grinding poverty for a reason. The grinding is going on in your head and that will drive you mad. For a long list of reasons, jumping past the most bottom rung of the employment latter is something few people in this situation will ever be able to do. A well paid programming job isn&#x27;t a bottom rung job.<p>Well paid development jobs are well paid because they are hard to get and hard to employ for. If it were easy, then they wouldn&#x27;t be well paid. Teaching people in the ghetto how to write code isn&#x27;t going to help them get these jobs and it isn&#x27;t going to help employers in hiring.<p>Freelancing and the gig economy is even worse. You can make far more money going solo by starting your own shop than by traditional employment. But the same ratios work here as in the rest of the economy. You get 1% (or less) who can figure out the game and thrive while everyone else just scrapes by.

Yes.