Software literacy is equivalent to: being able to drive a car, fuel it, decode the various dashboard lights when they blink, maybe change a tire and check the oil.
Software engineering is: Being a car mechanic.
So is it very useful to society if the vast majority of adults are able to drive. It is not important or worth the effort to have a majority of adults as fully trained car mechanics. Although it is good to have "on ramps" for those with the aptitude and inclination to pick it up, as a useful and paying job.
It is _now_ useful to society if the vast majority of adults are able to use a maps app, a messaging app, a word processor, maybe a formula in spreadsheet, calendar a zoom call and unmute themselves, have email and can distinguish a phishing email from real bank communications, ignore fake news on social media, etc.
The difference between a formula in a spreadsheet and full-time coding is one of degree, not kind; but you could say the same about changing a tire vs. a full vehicle overhaul.
However there is one important difference between software developers and car mechanics, and that is that our work is in cyberspace so it can be effortlessly duplicated and sold a million times over. Car mechanics operate in meatspace, so in order to get paid they need to keep on fixing cars. A software developer could fix just one virtual car and then keep earning money forever thanks to intellectual property laws. It doesn't seem like equal pay for equal work.
Thinking about it this way has led me to become more skeptical of intellectual property laws. Software development isn't especially more difficult than any other skill, but we are disproportionately rewarded for it due arbitrary legal constructs. It seems like the industry has a vested interest in giving the impression that what we do is impossibly complicated. If more people realized the truth, there might be a stronger call to abolish or at least reduce the terms of copyright, patents and so on.
He goes on, of course, to argue that the car analogy is the wrong one.
The latter requires understanding of computers, problem solving, domains, etc. Just like I can't pick up a book about organic chemistry and understand it, people are not going to some day care to know about how distributed systems algorithms work.
It is indeed a skilled craft and this weird, cyberpunk-ian idea that everyone will just converge on technical literacy is very hand wavey and ignores simple facts like some people just not having ANY interest in computers or tech.
Some people are illiterate, some people can read simple documents but struggle with higher complexity texts and contracts, and some people can breeze through high complexity texts. In the same way, some people struggle with computers, some are able to understand Excel spreadsheets, some are able to understand business logic expressed in a domain specific language, and some are able to read complex programs.
Yes, you're right, but i would take the meaning that understanding Software development and deployment and how that can be leveraged is a literacy. There's tons of IT transformation disasters because the companies upping their literacy get stuck with knowing the words (SOA and Agile) but don't know how to make coherent use of them.
Most projects these days are IT projects.
Think about it like a dev, Software on a computer is useful. Networked software is more useful. Cloud and IaaS is really useful, SaaS is a really really useful and knowing when to use each to actually get stuff done is the most useful of all.
I actually prefer the reverse progression as the closer it is to my computer / my server the less I spend on feeding somebody else's insatiable appetites. Being connected is one thing. Giving somebody else more and more control over your business is totally different.
Management always thinks a new web report / dashboard will solve all the problems.
Team then spends a week or month building said report into system.
Only to find that it doesn’t help anything. Six months of iterations later it’s correct and useful.
Or have someone build a one off report in excel. Iterate a few times that afternoon until it’s correct. Then it’s handed off to developers. Avoiding months of rework.
The boundaries of what we call 'software development' are fuzzy, but that's true for all sorts of things. Assembling a computer doesn't make you an electronic engineer, despite that you're building a complex electronic system. If a high school teacher comes up with a basic arithmetic question that, by coincidence, has never been asked before, the teacher still doesn't count as a research mathematician for solving it.
Peak SV.
Only 4% of people knew how to read during the middle ages.
Mostly clergy and civil servants.
The grandparent poster is right imo. If programming becomes just another thing everyone knows, and takes a software class every year like they take an English class, the world will be way better off.
Programming on the other hand is creating new abstractions (i.e modelling). It never becomes trivial, because it's not just a new encoding of existing abstractions.
I think programming is no different than maths. Yes, everyone will have to know a little bit of it, but very few will be capable of modelling complex problems or implementing large software systems.
That's exactly my point. Coming up with a great story is very difficult. Writing it down is trivial in comparison.
>Everyone I know who isn't necessarily a software engineer but has basic programming skills has benefited from that knowledge.
I completely agree. It's very useful and should be taught in school just like maths is taught in school. Maybe it should be taught as part of maths.
My point is that the cognitive difficulty of formal modelling is on a completely different level than that of transcribing words. We should adjust our expectations accordingly.
I'd like to read this if anyone can find it. :)
Think of all the instances of maths used globally. Do the millions of people who more or less get the idea of an average - this is used across politics, and common discourse. Does that count as maths? I would say yes, just as a for loop is programming. No we are not expecting a compiler but just "arranging the world so it can be easily iterated over" is a fine common objective.
Yes, that's exactly what I meant when I said "a little bit of it".
The reason programming is not an extension of our natural language is because we haven't included those concepts in our natural language yet.
The world would be way better off if everyone had better logic and analytical thinking ability
Put it another way. The reason we interview people the way that we do, is because it isn't realistic (unfortunately) to expect that a CS grad can fizz-buzz, or delete from a linked list, or whatever. Anyone who has spent a little time interviewing can confirm this. Why should we expect that secondary education would do a better job?
In contrast, it's now completely ordinary for a teenager to not only get to the core ideas but solve complex calculations with them in timed tests!
I think DaVinci was way before Newton.
High school students aren't asked to invent calculus just to understand it.
I didn't invent djikstras graph traversal algorithm but I can read and understand it.
I think there's a difference between original invention and understanding 'n usage.
In a more extreme version, consider that ancient Greek and Roman mathematicians struggled with long division problems that many of us can do in our heads now!
Why? Arabic numerals are far more effective than Roman numerals for the task and after having learned them, we have a permanently increased ability to do certain kinds of calculation.
I look at quicksort and that was revolutionary at the time.
Do we have ways to better conceptualize the world around us? Or are our brains evolving outside of some normal evolutionary process?
Fascinating to me.
Arabic numerals, literacy, maps, bayesian reasoning, etc are unnatural, but better ways to conceptualize the world around us and these tools and others have steadily become more prevalent throughout the population.
Maybe quicksort hasn't permated through much of society, but binary search has! People born 100 years ago became comfortable flipping through phone books and quickly finding a name, whereas that would have taken a conceptual leap for most born 200 years ago.
I think it's a failure of the school system from a very early age because math is heavily dependent on foundations of previous classes.
And I think it's more than just sharing the information we have to also make rational thinking fields as fun and cool as the emotional expression fields of study like English or Music and not the domain of 'nerds'.
I think our whole culture would be way better off if people had better critical thinking logic and math skills.
This is a point I hadn't thought enough about before. Great insight.
It makes me think that maybe we just suck at education in general, and it only shows up in the subjects where continuation is dependent on previous courses.
If you completely fail to understand american history, you can lie to yourself about being good at it, and continue to believe that when you get to european history. If you completely fail to understand the lessons from Fahrenheit 451, you can believe you're good at English (the subject, not the language) while you move on to Shakespeare.
The only (pre-college) subjects I can think of that really require you to actually understand the prereq's material are math and language. And they share that people say "I'm just not a math person" or "I'm just no good at languages."
I'd never thought about it with that lens before, but now I'm feeling kinda pessimistic. Like, if this hypothesis is true, it's not about bringing math education up to the bar of other subjects, it's about overhauling the entire system.
Widespread ability to read and write natural language seems to've, eventually, made written constitutions not so-much "viable" but "necessary".
It's easy to forget how innovative the U.S. Constitution was for being written, content aside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions
Definitely excited about the social implications of widespread ability to read and write executable language in the long run, note when France crossed 50% literacy though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#/media/File:Illiterac...
It's not just "can my employees write a for loop" but it's "do we store data sensibly, when upper management wants a report is there a data history stretching back to the raw (ie no manual involvement). Do we all publish APIs and work through those defined interfaces - and many more.
Do you mean basic skills in using a desktop computer, or do you mean software engineering skills?
> we don't talk about the literacy department
Software development is a skilled craft, and will remain so.