Re:Alan Kay – Normal Considered Harmful (2009) [video]
by agumonkey on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @02:04PM
(#10005111)
Moving fast is valuable sometimes, as much as going away in a hammock as Hickey would say. Learning how to alternate both scales is missing though. And I often thought smart people had that down, they could think ideals, then get down through the stack to effectively make things, then get back to the abstraction without losing focus or getting lost. Quite often I'm stuck at one level or the other.
> This is one of the reasons why I mostly scoff at attempts to make computer programming a compulsory schooling subject. Coding as "the new literacy" devalues computing and is the very embodiment of the programming pop culture that Alan Kay has warned about.
Especially since the people behind this idea have zero idea about what is programming. Some want people to learn HTML, which is pretty much void.
Re:Alan Kay – Normal Considered Harmful (2009) [video]
by widdershins on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @08:40PM
(#10007366)
It's hard to cultivate a good literary culture until you have a large literate and critical audience. Perhaps the same is true for programming culture.
I agree with your other points though.
We have largely crafted a culture where doing research before writing code is considered slow and ineffectual for whatever reason. Instead, we value "moving fast and breaking things" and whipping up the quick hack, which encourages people to propagate their computing biases and never step out of their comfort zone.
This is one of the reasons why I mostly scoff at attempts to make computer programming a compulsory schooling subject. Coding as "the new literacy" devalues computing and is the very embodiment of the programming pop culture that Alan Kay has warned about.