[Cialug] Do you wish you were a web programmer?

[Pete Trbovich]

Pete here...

OK, I'll delurk for this one and succumb to the debate sucking me into Rant Mode...

Yes, everyone should learn to code.

I'm only talking about a basic, beginner's level course in any random EZ language like Javascript or Python or even FSM-forbid, Visual Basic.

To use the dreaded Car Analogy, anybody who drives a car should be familiar with basic car maintenance like changing a tire or the oil. Because it helps you be a smarter, safer driver. There's this false dichotomy out there that "programming is for hackers" and "knowing how to program a computer" is the same thing as "knowing how to build your own car from scratch starting from blocks of steel and a lathe". That's false. Knowing just a little bit of scripting is the equivalent of knowing how to change your car's air filter.

The thing is, we're surrounded by tech. And when you have a society where everybody is forced to rely on tech but nobody has the first clue how it works, you have Morlocks and Eloi. We see the result today: Everything's broken, and no one knows why. It starts with the "blinking 12:00" problem on VCRs back in the '80s. It continues today to "the network's down" and Twitter showing a fail whale page and Washington DC servers getting hacked and your mom getting phished by 419 scammers from Russia. It leads to all those helpless users making clueless calls to the help desk which we all pull our hair out over. There's a big wall between the wizards and the muggles today, and we need to tear that sucker down.

A wonderful case in point just happened in the Oracle-vs-Google case, posted to Slashdot yesterday:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/05/16/1612228/judge-to-oracle-a-high-schooler-could-write-rangecheck

How many times have we all been frustrated with some legal decision that makes all our lives miserable, and it's all because the judge and jury set precedents about technology without knowing the first thing about it? Well, here's a judge who did it right. Yes, U.S. District Judge William Alsup can program! Is he going to use that skill to quit the legal profession and go be a code monkey in a database mill somewhere? No, of course not - but knowing code helped him be a better judge.

You may say "edge case", but *everything* these days is an edge case, and they all have the line of tech-literacy at their defining boundary.

In my own freelance work, I very rarely get hired for a programming job directly. But I get into all kinds of projects where being able to write a script to solve a problem saved the day. My daughter had an easier time picking up algebra in school because I'd already taken a summer back there to show her Python basics. Other kids were struggling with the Xs and Ys, but she saw variables and thought "I've done this before". Just last night at our excellent host's presentation, knowing how to squeeze the data out of that Nike band led to the discovery of how much data Nike collects about you when you use their product. So it helps you be a better-informed consumer regarding rights-to-privacy vs corporations' drive to collect telemetric data about us. 

So there's all those secondary benefits...

I don't live in fantasy land; I know this is impossible. Knowing how to cook and understanding nutrition would help us all be healthier, and everybody eats, so you'd think that would be a no-brainer, right? Yet we have an obesity epidemic. If we can't get people to understand a nutrition pyramid and a calorie chart, well, where does that leave tech literacy?

We, as a society, know deep-down what to do. We just don't do it.

(And I love it when the bottom of the coffee cup and the end of the rant comes out even.)

Be well,
Pete


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