Take it a step further and teach actual data analysis and statistics that are not coin flip/compound interest plug and chug into the calculator problems. No matter what sort of job you do in life, being able to pull a csv from all your different credit or debit accounts and draw some inferences from that would be so useful.

Just because something fancy (or even basic) is on the curriculum doesn't mean that anyone is learning anything.

No matter how well meaning, high school barely teaches most people anything in practice.

I’m not sure what “actual data analysis” is exactly, but it sounds like something that would be better handled in a stats or science class.

Though, if programming were taught as a basic problem solving tool like writing and arithmetic, just stuck in the toolbox, a science class would probably benefit from having it there. For example, if it was expected that a kid could do programming as well as they can write a lab report, then it would probably be easy enough to add some sort of “call Numpy to do a linear regression” type section at the end of every lab report.

This sort of programming is an everyday force multiplier, and it ought to be taught as such.

What I learnt from the emergence of chatGPT was that way more people were allergic to writing even a small note than I thought.

Look at all the other classes people are already sitting through for high school and not learning anything either. What makes you think this one would be any different?

Already around the world high schools all have something highfalutin like 'teaching critical thinking' in their curriculum.

> What makes you think this one would be any different?

Because unlike almost all other classes, that one would be immediately beneficial in daily life, in a direct and apparent way.

No it won't, unless we build infrastructure for them to work with.

Even worse, given modern security standards, I wouldn't be surprised if programming and scripting were to be prohibited in the next ten years or so.

It seems like a negative feedback loop or something, nobody uses these sorts of features, so nobody implements them, and then the skills are less useful…

Microsoft Excel (or cloud-based spreadsheets) will always be allowed. Even if they remove scripting abilities, a clever person can remove a lot of office busy work with just basic Excel functionalities like pivot tables.

Basic scripting abilities would be beneficial years later for the subset of the kids who become office drones.

I would agree with your assessment about 'immediately beneficial in daily life', if you were talking about a course offered to adults who are already working a white collar job.

Literacy rates in the US are pretty high I think, compared to where we were before k-12 schooling became standard.

And most people can do basic arithmetic, right?

The goal, I think, to start should be to get to the point where an office of 10 or so people has at least one or two who can string together basic scripts.

> Literacy rates in the US are pretty high I think, compared to where we were before k-12 schooling became standard.

'Post hoc ergo propter hoc.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

By and large, kids from well-off parents were always more literate, and they still are. And the US is a lot richer now than it used to be.

So your reasoning is "elites have always been more educated then average, so standard education cannot have had an effect in average literacy"? It is far more reasonable (and verifiable) to conclude that widespread standard education is more than just correlated with higher average rates of literacy.

Byran Caplan's Case Against Education might be a good place to start. The author has collected a lot of statistics.

For the second time in as many days, I find myself saying on HN: your argument only makes sense if you reduce all societal logic to economic logic. What a way to live.

If schools aren’t even teaching basic things like arithmetic and literacy, then what are they? Just a place to park kids while their parents work? In that case, might as well also do some programming classes, right? If the other option is learning nothing.

I mean, if you want to totally revamp the education system, I’m here for it, but I guess that seems like a bigger project to me.

Bryan Caplan's Case Against Education might be a good place to start, if you want to have a broader discussion about the education system.

And yes, baby sitting is a big part of the package that schools do provide in practice.

> In that case, might as well also do some programming classes, right?

I don't think programming classes would do any more damage than the current curriculum.

> If the other option is learning nothing.

Well, giving the kids free time or more physical activity might also be useful?

Add it to reach the average-smart kids, those without internal knowledge of where to look or internal motivation to learn (but still will take the advanced classes for a grade).

Teaching people a scripting language when the language has been already chosen for them, platform has been prepared, data preformatted etc. might be easy - a non-trivial share of my classmates couldn't comprehend a for loop though.

To have real transferrable programming skill - I am not talking about one that will get you a software engineering job, just basic problem solving - you need to know an awful lot about how computers work. Otherwise you'll quickly get overwhelmed by errors you can't comprehend at all stages , not being able to get data in right format, not knowing what tools are suitable for what problems etc.

It might be the case that a better language for this sort of thing would have to be designed. Maybe somebody needs to take another crack at the sort of Visual Basic/Excel type environment.

I think someone on this site chimes in occasionally with a sort of “spreadsheet, but each cell runs a line of Python” type program they’ve been working on (although I can’t remember the name unfortunately). That could be a good basis…

vb (6?) may have been copy and paste back in the day but with the advent and continuing "work" on .net VB is just as impenetrable as all the others now.

Spreadsheets might already be that better environment. You can solve a load of spreadsheets with some smarts and just spreadsheets (no Visual Basic or so necessary).

But that doesn't mean _teaching_ people how to solve problems is any easier.

When every workflow and every bit of data passes through computers (even if, as often in German bureaucracy, just to be printed out and filed) everyone is a programmer. Living in denial and programming ad hoc, non specified, untested, programs in very indirect and flawed ways is much worse then just teaching everyone basics of computing.

Computers are vital and unavoidable technology. Once it was arcane knowledge to read and write, to make calculations. It will be trivial in the future to know the basics of computer science and scripting.

So, banks do actually do a lot of this. They hire people who are not really programmers by background and then teach them what they call robotic automation.

This has nothing to do with actual robots, which can make it confusing if you come across this without having the right context. What they mean by this is they have a commercial tool that implements a very simple scripting language, often in a structured way so you can edit it without using an editor. The tool has lots of commands for automating GUI actions like "find this window by title", "click that button", "load this web page", "find text that looks like this", "loop" and so on.

The idea here is that a lot of processes involve moving data from one app or window to another in a repetitive manner, so if you have a programming language optimized for that and designed for beginners, you can automate a lot of stuff. It's not a scripting language like Python, it's totally focused on driving GUIs. And it works! Robotic automation is a huge deal in some companies.

I helped an ex-girlfriend learn this stuff at one point. She sort of bluffed her way through the interview, they were looking for people with more computing experience but she was a woman so the hiring was more or less automatic despite her knowing nothing about computers at all (woke companies ...) Despite the tool being designed for such people she still found it really really hard though! Some people just really struggle with structured thinking of any kind. Writing down instructions in a formal way was just totally alien to her. The tool tried its best to help users avoid mistakes but fundamentally you still have to be able to think in terms of loops, lists, multi-step processes and so on. I think she did eventually get there but it took a long time and she failed the internal exams the first time.