Apparently this idiot thinks that all coders are exceptionally dull weirdos. I’ll quite happily admit to being a weirdo, but as to exceptionally dull … I only seem that way to the exceptionally thick, or prejudiced.
Concentrating for the moment about this journalist’s (in the loosest possible sense of the word) insult to a good number of people, we can probably deduce the following :-
- He doesn’t know many developers socially. If he accidentally encounters one in a social setting one of the following occurs :-
- The developer denies all knowledge of computers because of the prejudice of idiots like him. This is a bit of self defence we geeks learned in the past and used in the past. So we can also assume he’s a bit of a dinosaur (like me).
- Once he learns someone is a developer, he will climb the walls to get out of the way.
- He converses in his own specialised area, and anyone who runs away is classified as an exceptionally dull weirdo.
- If he thinks that coding is mechanistic, he is totally clueless about programming, and thinks that anyone can simply start writing code immediately. As a little hint, the majority of the time spent programming is thinking; simply grinding out code is a relatively small part of the job.
- Lumping coding in with car mechanics, or plumbing in a derogatory manner indicates this guy is one of those fools who think that anything technical is a low-status activity. Hope his plumber tells him to fix it himself when his next water leak occurs, or charges him double!
Now onto the main point of his ill educated rant on the subject of teaching “coding” to school children. Hopefully the government plans to teach “programming” rather than “coding”, but does he have a point? Perhaps, although it’s a bit difficult to take an idiot like this seriously.
It really depends on exactly what and how it is being taught.
If the plan is to turn out vast swarms of fully fledged developers, everyone is going to be disappointed; apart from anything else, if we were going to turn out fully fledged developers it would have a catastrophic effect on every other subject being taught. After all, it would take so much teaching time away from other subjects, there wouldn’t be enough time for Maths, English, History, etc.
But if the intention is to teach programming in a fun way (say with Logo and robots), with the intention of giving students a better idea of how computers work and how they are instructed, it could well be a good thing.
Not everyone needs to code he claims. Actually most people may find themselves coding in ways that may not be thought of as programming – setting up formula in a spreadsheet, setting up a database, automating a task in a word processor. Although none of these are “true” programming, they do share some elements with it – not least to think about the task in hand, dividing it up into sub-tasks, and setting about telling the computer how to do those tasks in a way that the computer will understand.
Does everyone need this? Perhaps not, but they will find using computers much more effective if they have a better idea of what is going on.
