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Why Johnny Can't Code
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Sep 14, 2006 06:58 AM
from the back-in-my-day dept.
from the back-in-my-day dept.
GoCanes writes "Salon has an article named 'Why Johnny Can't Code,' an interesting examination of the dearth of line programming languages available today. At first I wanted to read this and say aha, here's a simple line oriented language that's available through open source, but after reading the article I couldn't find any. And being an old fart, I remember the days spent with edlin and basic."
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Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Interesting)
CS a branch of mathematics? (Score:5, Insightful)
It may gall college profs who are still trying to foist formal methods on people but setting a high mathematical barrier to entry on CS courses and having a high maths content is a bad thing.
As an example I have a first in Microelectronics from a British University (a course which had a large syllabus covering 'C' and machine language) but only just scraped the 'C' grade needed in mathematics as an entrance to this course despite having 'A's in Electronics and Computing. I doubt I have used any maths much beyond British 'O' level standard since and certainly the maths knowledge required as entry to a degree level CS course is too wide and deep. It is all geared up to people going onto research rather than the real world. You don't need to be an expert in set theory to write the level of SQL required by most applications.
Re:CS a branch of mathematics? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't begrudge UT for wanted to offer an applied mathematics program in their CS department, but I didn't want that, and was basically told that if I wanted to have a life where I did cool stuff with computers, I had to learn Diff. EQ, calculus-based engineering physics, and a whole lot of theory and proofs of CS (emphasis on the _Science_) concepts that perhaps
Another concern I have with university-level CS programs is that not a whole lot of actual TEACHING goes on. Lower-level courses are "taught" in giant halls where ethereal profs tend to cater to students who already knew the material before they got to high school. It just goes downhill from there. I didn't realize how bad it was until I got to another department where they actually started with the basics, _taught_ the fundamentals, and developed students through to competency.
It's like CS departments got lazy on teaching because they have such a wealth of students who have been dicking around with this stuff since they were 5, just because it was fun.
Re:CS a branch of mathematics? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's not true. 10 years ago most desktop software was written in C++ and Java - a hugely simplified form of it - was the next big thing. Fast forward 10 years and most desktop software is written in C++. Most new languages and tools are pretty similar to old ones. Radically different toolsets like pure functional languages have never taken off, and show no signs of doing so. The best programmers are still the ones with the most experience, not the ones who know the most pure maths.
The point of all the math is to make the subject sufficiently academic that it is acceptable to universities, who are scared by anything vocational.
The skills that everyday programmers need to do everyday jobs are more around understanding the tools they'll be working with - how a computer actually works, what version control is, how to architect software to be modular, what regular expressions are, how to work with debuggers etc. These are the skills that university graduates routinely lack, and routinely get nailed in job interviews by.
Bits of the math are useful - being able to work in base 2 and base 16 for instance, or having a basic understanding of time/space complexity. Unfortunately most courses focus on big O notation to a ridiculous extent, meaning that it's not uncommon to see "data structure abuse", where some extremely fancy and theoretically fast algorithm is used, but due to some awkward practical factor like poor locality or excessive memory usage ends up being slow.
Re:CS a branch of mathematics? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that this applies to programmers.
I disagree that this applies to software engineers.
There is a big difference between the two.
The point of all the math is to make the subject sufficiently academic that it is acceptable to universities, who are scared by anything vocational.
Universities are not scared by anything vocational. However, it doesn't fit with their role in education. If you want a vocation, go to a community college or something else. They will teach you the "hot" programming language, environment, skills, etc. However, these things are fleeting. What are the hot areas today? Ruby on Rails? Security? LAMP? What was it 5 years ago? Java?
Now, if you get a solid grounding in theory and skills that apply to different areas, it doesn't matter what the hot area is. You can use your foundation and learn that area quickly. If you have a solid background in programming, including different languages, picking up a new language is easy. If you have a good grounding in networks and OSes, then picking up security is much easier. So, universities don't aim for the hot areas, they aim for giving you the skills and tools to be successful in the long run.
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
One of my most memorable classes was the C++ class when the teacher started off by teaching how compilers actually compile your code. Directly from this you could easy see what code to write and what not to write. Those classes have been replaced by Java, where you don't even worry about resource leaks. Hey, garbage collector takes care of it!
To make good programmers, one has to understand the basis of it. Compilers, C and Assembler. If all they learn today, well mostly OOP stuff, they won't learn the basis well. And they will end up writing bloated code left and right.
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, lets take the author's wishlist - creating Pong. I'd wager that the game can be written in a lot more expressive manner in any higher-level language, compared to basic. Poking different screen locations arent a lot of fun; gorilla.bas gets old very soon. Kids like instant gratification(adults too!)- higher level languages are ideal for this.
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean you need to know about peeks and pokes? In today's world, I no longer think so (and there's that huge collective sigh of relief from students everywhere). But you should definitely understand how your language handles memory, even if you're coding in a language with GC capabilities. It keeps you from churning memory and slowing down your app to a crawl.
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I was learning I thought it was cool to be able to make a simple text guessing game, and making ASCII animation on a Commodore PET was just awesome. It'd be considered totally lame today.
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Interesting)
Architecting beautiful code? Nope.
Learning powerful, high-level abstractions? Nope.
Programming efficiently to the hardware.
With computers getting ever-faster and more advanced, coding efficiently is less and less important than it used to be. Efficient algorithms are still pretty important, but that's more about using matrix calculations and streamlining progam flow than about the intricacies of memory-management and choosing where on the hard disk you place your data for minimum retrieval time.
Witness the rise of interpreted languages like Perl/Ruby/PHP. Look at how semi-compiled bytecode languages like Java and the
Don't get me wrong - I first learned BASIC, then C, then C++ and a bit of assembler, and I wouldn't trade this knowledge for the world. Nevertheless, now when I write C# code which is compiled to MSIL/.NET bytecode, which is then interpreted by the
These days kids are learning how to use high-level tools first, and only learning the lower-level stuff as they get better and better. Sure this means an awful lot of nasty, bloated beginner-level PHP and VB.NET, but by the time they're ready to tackle compiler design they've generally already picked up the important bits as they go.
When we were learning code we'd write crappy code in BASIC/C, and it'd sit on our home PCs and never go anywhere. Now when a kid writes crappy PHP or VB.NET it's generally posted to a forum or used to run their website, so of course it's more visible.
We all wrote crappy code when we were learning, irrespective of the language. Certainly, I know I wrote some BASIC/C code that makes me cringe when I think of it now.
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a story about Abraham Lincoln when he was a cogressman. He received a questionnaire sent to new congressman in which they were supposed to give background information about themselves. When he came to the question which asked for a description of his education he filled in a single word: "deficient".
In fact, Lincoln felt the deficiency of his education so keenly he began an independent study of Euclid's Elements, with the intent of sharpening his thinking. Reportedly he mastered the material through book 6, which means everything relating to plane geometry, but not number theory or solid geometry. I'd argue that Lincoln's formidable intellectual accumen, whether it stemmed from his study of Euclid or from his native faculties, is often missed in the sentimental haze that surrounds the man.
The point of these anecdotes is this. There are certain areas of knowledge where thoughtful persons would have to label their education "deficient", any accomplishments they may have in them notwithstanding, because they are bottomless sources of utility. You just named two of them: mathematics and communication.
The need for remedial classes at the university level doesn't come from a degeneration of the educational system. It comes from a social and economic change which makes a bachelor's degree a minimal requirement for decent employment. Fifty years ago, there were two kinds of people who went to college. The socially elite, for whom a "Gentleman D" was perfectly acceptable. Arguably the societies they joined and contacts they made were the most important reasons to go. And the intellectually elite. The middle class, non intellecutally elite student got a job, often in a factory, which maintained him in the middle class and did not require a degree.
The growing need to have a university degree in the last half of the twentieth century led to the perennial concern of declining college board admission test scores, from which it was concluded that primary and secondary education was deteriorating. However, it's important to remmeber that average scores are average scores of a population sample, and if the population being sampled changes, you can't compare the scores. Adjusted for demographic changes, there was no decline in scores. There literally couldn't be, because of the little known fact that the tests and scoring scales are continually recalibrated by the testing agencies to ensure that students in any given segment of the academic population score the same from year to year.
However, we have been the beneficiary, first of the Sputnik scare, then the SAT scare. For most students, education is actually much more rigorous today than it was fifty years ago. I went to elementary school almost forty years ago. My school was unusual in putting a great deal more emphasis in critical thinking and reading skills. My children go to an elementary school where the reading curriculum is much more challenging, and the math curriculum requires that students be able to reason mathematically and recognize situations where various mathematical techniques need to be used -- a huge improvement over the education of my era, which graduated countless students who could regugitate the quadratic equation forumula but had no idea when it might be useful.
What happens when complexity gets out of control (Score:4, Interesting)
Programs used to be simpler and written by *ONE PERSON* - you could read and learn from someone else's code. Nowadays, most programmers are just a cog in a wheel using an IDE to implement one function in one library, and they rarely grasp the code in it's entirety
Cars used to be simple, mechanical entities where the underlying workings hadn't changed much in decades. Nowadays, cars are so chock full of electronics and there's hardly anything improvable by a single person these days
Electronics used to be "simple" - circuit boards were single layer and traces could be easily seen with the naked eye. ICs were standard parts you could by at Radio Shack. Parts could be hand soldered, removed, and replaced. Nowadays, parts are all custom, miniaturized, with 5-layer circuit boards, and they're just too complex for any one person to fully understand.
Phones and radios were originally very basic and simple and easy to understand / fix. Nowadays, we satellite radio and cellular phones that VERY FEW people understand enough about to actually work on.
People used to know how to do everything that it took to run a farm. Managing livestock, crops, construction, markets etc. Nowadays, people just vegetate in their condo, drive to work, sit in front of a computer, and drive home. They don't need to know how to SURVIVE.
I've said this before... if there were a catastrophic event that destroyed most of society, very few people would have enough knowledge to rebuild what we currently have.
Therefore, I believe that we as a society are getting dumber because we need to know less, and because modern medicine can keep nearly anyone alive long enough to reproduce, I'd say that evolution of the human species has stopped and that as a species, we're getting weaker.
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
Before they did anything else they were writing programs. Simple ones that started the game. Next they were playing with loops:
And er,
That's not like any BASIC program *I* ever wrote! (Score:5, Funny)
Amateur.
Re:Don't forget "Insightful" (Score:5, Insightful)
What kids are after is fun. I did a ton of programming when I was a kid, and I never seriously considered doing it for a living until after I graduated from college. It was just fun.
What's missing is that programming languages used to be built into the computer. For me, BASIC was there when I booted up the computer. Documentation aimed at complete beginners like me was the norm. It would have been hard *not* to program.
These days the easiest way to start out would be with Python. It seems simple to us, but...
1 - know it exists
2 - know how to download the right version for your computer (not a mac or linux version)
3 - find the installer and know to run it (and know that it's safe)
4 - figure out how to invoke the installed program (ok, that one's easy)
5 - find documentation written for beginning programmers
6 - figure out why python won't run the programs you saved as
Can you imagine an eight-year-old Windows user with clueless parents doing all that by himself?
I didn't have to download anything or know anything about operating systems. I don't remember having to sort through tons of titles like "Advanced BASIC Beowulf Architectures in 2 Minutes for J2EE Certified Hardware Astroengineers" at the bookstore to find one that was right for me. In fact, I'm pretty sure the book I used came in the same box as the computer. Plus, all the computer magazines had program listings in the back that you could type in.
Microsoft would earn big brownie points with parents if they included an extremely simple IronPython-based (or even Logo-based) "Learn To Program" IDE with every copy of Windows. Twenty years ago, people knew how to write documentation for beginners. (Not children or computerphobes. Not people with congenital learning disabilities. Just beginners, of all kinds and ages.) I'm sure it could be done again.
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:4, Insightful)
python
Python 2.4.3 (#2, Apr 27 2006, 14:43:58)
[GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print "Hello, World"
Hello, World
>>> 4 + 4
8
>>> while True:
sex
sex
sex
sex
sex
[and so on]
Then, when this gets frustrating, teach the rugrat how to save the program in a file, and run it that way.
I've been reading over the many, many letters that this article generated at Salon, and I'm blown away by the sheer number of people who claim that BASIC programs are somehow interacting with the computer on a lower level than C++, that BASIC somehow underpins the whole object-oriented system. Can someone explain what they're talking about?
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the best candidate for a BASIC replacement was HyperCard, but alas, that too is a dead project. It was cool, and its scripting language - HyperTalk - was revolutionary in that it was geared to resemble "natural English". Sure, it was limited in many ways, but the original Myst was made with HyperCard, and those of us that fiddled with it were ready when the Web hit prime time, already armed with the concepts of event-oriented design. HyperTalk scripts were easy to read, so easy that commenting became scarcer.
I can't find a worthy successor to HyperCard, though. IMHO Apple should release it under some open source agreement, so that it can be ported
Re:Kids today...... :-) (Score:4, Insightful)
I look at it like this: being a programmer is to computer literacy what being an expert mechanic is to the ability to drive a car. We don't need a society where everybody knows how to write software, just like we don't need a society where everybody knows how to rebuild a carburator.
Of course, I think it sucks that Windows doesn't ship with a C++ compiler (or whatever, language is not the issue). The anyone willing to do a little tinkering can have the tools they need to write some code quickly, and for free, on the internet. They just need a little encouragement and mentoring.
Johnny can't play chess. Johnny can't appreciate Fellini films. Whatever. If Johnny's not into those things, then he can pursue something else. The whole "Johnny Can't Code" thing is just nonsense. So what? As long as a kid learns to effectively use a computer, which in todays society means being able to navigate an OS, use a word processor, and run a browser and email client, they're going to be fine. For those of us who enjoy it, there are great and promising careers out there, but don't try to push it off onto everybody else.
passworded article (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:passworded article (Score:5, Funny)
Re:passworded article (Score:5, Informative)
Desktop Applets (Score:5, Interesting)
It is worth noting that Microsoft ships Visual Basic for Applications
with most of their software (at least they did when last I checked), and
OS X and many Linux distros ship Python.
Having said that, I agree that the world has changed and getting started
with programming isn't as natural as it used to be. Part of the reason
for that is that our expectations have changed, but languages haven't
really caught up. Nowadays, we expect programs to present us with fancy
GUI widgets. If all a program does is print some text to the terminal
and read some input from it, we don't feel we've written a real program.
However, in the majority of programming language, creating these fancy
GUI widgets is much more difficult than doing terminal I/O. Thus, either
the rewards are less, or the barrier to entry is higher.
On the other hand, there is HTML, which makes it very easy to create
user interfaces, but the user interfaces are somewhat limited and adding
in program logic can be very tedious.
Fortunately, software vendors are not sitting still. Konfabulator, Apple
Dashboard, gDesklets, Oprera Widgets, KDE's Dashboard, and Mozilla's XUL
(which is supported natively in Mozilla browsers, in Opera and MSIE
through plugins, while native support is being added to Konqueror and
Safari) are all ways to make it easy to create visually appealing
programs and add functionality to them. They are all based around the
concept of creating the user interface in XML, then using a scripting
language to implement the behavior. Indeed, this makes creating GUI
software easy enough that beginning computer users can do it.
I think these widgets are the future, especially once they will be
treated like full applications that live on the same desktop (last time
I checked, Apple Dashboard actually was a separate desktop from the one
that contains the "real" programs).
Re:Desktop Applets (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day we'd write BASIC, then graduate to C/C++ for the "proper" coding.
These days kids learn HTML, then Javascript to make the HTML do interesting things. Then they pick up PHP or Java (or VB if they're unlucky) and from there Perl, Ruby, Python, whatever.
The most popular "beginners" language is always the most powerful one with the lowest barrier to entry. Anything that you can pick up quickly and do cool stuff with provides the essential satisfaction feedback that keeps you progressing and getting better.
HTML provides the "oooh, pretties" before you even learn do any actual programming, and Javascript introduces you to loops/conditionals and even OOP if you want. PHP/VB then add in database integration and stricter efficiency requirements (not to mention often the added complication of stateless programming), and by the time you can program competently in them you're well on the way to becoming a full-fledged Developer.
I have a great hope for dashboard widgets - it's exactly the kind of low-barrier-to-entry, high-return-on-time-invested platform that makes it interesting to learners, and because it's Javascript it's even starting them off on the kind of language that's the most useful to learn[1].
[1] Not to knock VB, but if you learn BASIC or VB you can basically program in... BASIC or VB. Learn Javascript and you've got a leg-up on the syntax of C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Absolute nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
apt-get install \
bash \
python \
gambas2 \
kturtle \
fp-compiler fp-units-base \
php5-cli
The reason children don't code (if that is even true, as it's a completely unsubstantiated assertion) is because they don't want to.
I started programming when I was ten, and I did it by hand-converting Z80 assembly language to machine code and then used BASIC poke commands to write them into memory. I had to work hard to scrape a C compiler from somewhere and that was heaven.
Today it is a million times easier to write a program if you wanted to. Blame ease-of-use culture; blame video games; blame stupid parents; but blaming the lack of access to programming languages is ridiculous to say the least.
Re:Absolute nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowdays cool is Half-Life 2 type graphics. And I suppose the nearest to drawing a few boxes on the screen is coding DirectX/OpenGL shaders to do cool things on a few objects. The learning curve is still as steep, but think of all the stuff you need to know before getting something interesting done - it's a much longer way from bottom to top and you consequently need more determination to get there.
I think you'll now find many of the kids who would have previously cut code now working on mods for games. Maybe that will sprout creativity in a way that the article suggests, but it is difficult to see what.
3D Engines Game editors (Score:4, Interesting)
The editor presented the world as a 3D solid and you would cut away "rooms" and then apply textures. You could easily make an in-door or outdoor scene complete with sky, water, light sources, etc.
You could put together simple shapes to create complex objects, then script them easily to move around or even react to the player character in the game.
To really get complex reactions from the environment, or to get the lighting/shadows right required some understanding of basic math/trig, but even that is not that hard and the tutorials pointed you in the right direction.
This is about as close to the "wow factor" that I got from doing simple shapes on a TRS-80 back in the old days. Coding up your own version of Bezerk was awesome. Creating your own worlds and getting to explore them was almost as thrilling.
Re:3D Engines Game editors (Score:4, Interesting)
I just knocked off the code to import a 3d model of Downtown Berkley and display an interactive stereoscopic model with texture mapping in 267 lines of Python using only the enthought python distribution and the PyXML module. If I wanted to add joystick support that would be 10 more lines and the PyGame module. All the tools are free as in beer and speech. The only development tools I used were a text editor and the interactive command line.
A few months ago I knocked off a few hundred lines of Python code which logged gps, and processed the logs to provide KML files which came up in google earth with commented 3d paths of the GPS positions. Once again using FOSS with a command line and a text editor.
Insanely cool code is much simpler these days with high level Python bindings to just about everything.
As for physics, while there is a lot of very expensive cool stuff (CERN etc.) a lot of very cool physics is going on with dirt cheap tools. Lasers, microprocessor controls, high end optics, computers that make a Cray I look like a calculator etc. are available for next to nothing, allowing the Mac Guyver's of physics to do astounding things in their garage.
Re:Absolute nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
The same is true of electronics. In my college days (mid-80s) it was cool to wire up a circuit to make and LED blink, or a flash bulb fire. If you were really into it you could scrounge a HeNe laser tube and build yourself something really cool. These days, all that stuff is available for cheap. Blinking LEDs are literally given away free with breakfast cereal. Laser pointers are less than $10 and come with a variety of lenses to make images on the wall. The cool stuff is no longer easy, and the easy stuff is no longer cool.
I think it's just a sign of the technology maturing. The technology for its own sake is no longer interesting. Both programming and electronics are just means to an end. Now the cool stuff is making that technology do something. Yeah, there's a higher barrier to entry, but it's not insurmountable. Back then you had to program a game from scratch; now you can take an existing game and mod it. Back then getting a motor to turn was neat; now, you can build robots without worrying about the piddly stuff. I think there's still plenty of room for exploration and creativity, but it won't be the same as when my generation were kids. My kids' generation will take the basics that we laid down and build upon them, making whole new cool things. No, it's not the same as it was. It's better.
Re:Absolute nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
Why Line-Oriented? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why line-oriented?
Re:Why Line-Oriented? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Djkstra was right. With whatever apologies might be due to the author, his early exposure to BASIC has damaged his mind so beyond repair that he cannot concieve of a good learning language as being anything other than line oriented.
Python and Squeek, each in their own way, are probably the best learning languages ever devised. They are both "real" languages that can be used for "real" work after you learn them, but also serve as good stepping stones to other languages, without instilling you with a line oriented mind.
Programming students don't need to learn line numbers, they need to learn number; mathematics; and logical structure. Line numbers do nothing other than give the illusion that a program has structure, whether it actually has any or not.
KFG
Easy solution... (Score:4, Insightful)
Languages (Score:3, Interesting)
FreeBASIC... (Score:5, Informative)
Python?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Disregarding Python, what's wrong with Emac's elisp or a nice session with tcsh. You'd be hard pressed to find a computer that you couldn't run one of these languages on and I've just barely scratched the surface of possibilities
No I'd have to say that today's children are given an even richer programing environment to grow with than we were.
--Steve
Re:Python?! (Score:4, Insightful)
For kids, simple graphics are far more persuasive than watching text scroll down. If your answer for doing this in python is longer than 1 line or involves compiling packages, you've lost. Basic commands I remember were as simple as "gr", "hgr", "hgr2", "screen" and you were ready to go.
As the world changes... (Score:4, Interesting)
As hand made articles become assembly-line products
we wonder why the world has changed and our tools with it
Re:As the world changes... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're suggesting that programming is no longer as difficult as it was, then this would rather imply, a) programming viable applications is easier now than it was, or b) people are far more intelligent than they were. Neither explanation seems very likely. As far as I can see, programming is still a craft that very few people are capable of doing with any competance.
However, if you are suggesting that it has lost some of its 'elite' image, then perhaps you are right.
BTW: The article is by SF writer David Brin (Score:4, Informative)