I can see general programming being added to a school curriculum as most people think it's a guarantee at a good career (for some reason).
I don't mind this mindset, and would enjoy teaching such a course.
I look at it this way though, we theoretically teach every single American student how to write, has that caused an increase in high quality literature being produced? Theoretically, every high schooler can read, I'm curious what percentage of adults actually read literature for fun?
Most long form writing (which I'd consider to be analogous in complexity to large scale programming) is not very common. The average adult's writing is quick and "dirty". I'd expect to see an increase in programming similar in size, scope, and usefulness to email, text, lists, and meeting notes. It would be personal, private, and not meant to last. Tents, not marble palaces.
I think a much more valuable tool would be to teach everyone git (or something easier but still with good branching). For quick and dirty, excel is fine, and some improvement on it likely will come in our lifetimes. What I think is far more valuable is a way to version all text a person produces, with branching and history.
> we theoretically teach every single American student how to write, has that caused an increase in high quality literature being produced?
Maybe, who knows? How many American authors would have been illiterate if we didn't cast a wide net?
More to the point, you don't have to contribute a great piece of literature in order to get some value (and give society some value) from basic reading and writing skills. Basically everyone does some reading in their everyday life which is crucial to their level of productivity (and personal enjoyment).
> I'd expect to see an increase in programming similar in size, scope, and usefulness to email, text, lists, and meeting notes. It would be personal, private, and not meant to last. Tents, not marble palaces.
Very much agreed. I don't mean to suggest that software engineers would be displaced in any meaningful proportion, just that we could increase the productivity of everyone by a little bit :-)
The problem with quick and dirty excel, is that the temporary gaps that it fills become permanent solutions. The a couple of years down the line, too many parts of the system are hinged around an unreliable error prone excel sheet, when something better should have been written.
Well that's just it, what is "better"? Currently, the software to replace a typical excel spreadsheet is prohibitively expensive. (As someone who currently makes a "spreadsheet replacer", I've heard our BA regularly comment that it takes us tens of thousands of dollars to add in features he was able to add to his spreadsheet in a few minutes.)
I recognize that we are building a cathedral meant to last, and he was building a tent that was error-prone and easy to break. The thing that gets me is how fast he was able to turn data into the answers he needed. Why don't my tools let me put something that fast together?
I've become lately interested in the idea of a "better excel" that could solve the issues excel has: easy to "forget" a new row or cell, hard to version, hard to share, stuck behind a complex gui, hard to add bigger data, etc. I think such a tool could greatly increase the "general programming" of the world far better than just teaching high schoolers to program. Most people who would program either do so for someone else (trying to automate something) or for work because they need to get an answer out of some data. I think excel IS a programming language, it just has a gui instead of text. I think if that was improved upon, it would meet a big need.
I don't mind this mindset, and would enjoy teaching such a course.
I look at it this way though, we theoretically teach every single American student how to write, has that caused an increase in high quality literature being produced? Theoretically, every high schooler can read, I'm curious what percentage of adults actually read literature for fun?
Most long form writing (which I'd consider to be analogous in complexity to large scale programming) is not very common. The average adult's writing is quick and "dirty". I'd expect to see an increase in programming similar in size, scope, and usefulness to email, text, lists, and meeting notes. It would be personal, private, and not meant to last. Tents, not marble palaces.
I think a much more valuable tool would be to teach everyone git (or something easier but still with good branching). For quick and dirty, excel is fine, and some improvement on it likely will come in our lifetimes. What I think is far more valuable is a way to version all text a person produces, with branching and history.