I have the merest suspicion that some of those tildes got treated as strikethroughs by the Discourse’s Markdown engine.
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I’d suggest the CODE tag, but with Perl that might be inapt.
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I’ve been working with computers since middle school and have been surrounded by very complex software and enterprise systems for the better part of 30 years. I agree that it is stupid to force kids into programming classes at young ages as there are many avenues to computer literacy besides coding.
I know how to code and have worked with many different languages over the years - Basic, VB, C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, and now Python along with a slew of alphabetic protocols…however, I am notably very bad at programming. I know I suck at coding and will probably never improve much because coding, to me, is and always has been boring.
I can and still do hack around at various scripts and programs when necessary but put me in front of a blank screen with nothing but a set of requirements and I will never be able to deliver a working program. I need something to start with - a stubbed out function with comments, working examples, or better yet…“borrowed” code from someone else. Thankfully coding is not my primary job function.
Understanding system architectures and translating technical information into business value is what I’m good at and has afforded my a very productive career in software without having to actually produce code. I have the structural and foundational knowledge of programming which allows me to understand how and more importantly, why it works. This is very valuable for companies who need someone who can translate tech speak to customers without having to dress up code monkeys in suits and watch them sweat during sales calls.
In other words, I have people skills.
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This whole thread is quickly going off the rails.
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I’m a passable coder, but it’s not my primary job function either. There’s a lot of physics, engineering, and statistics knowledge that is much more important than coding.
My general point is the same as yours. Making it a required course at all is a bad idea, much less in elementary school. A basic grasp of math and science is far more important in general, and our schools are doing an abysmal job of instilling that.
People who are interested in coding will self-select and take an elective if it’s offered, and having only motivated students in the class will make it possible to actually teach something useful.
Actually, I wonder… I’d really like to run some of the thousands of lines of perl code that I’ve written through something that would display them as paint spatters. Does anyone know of a program that does that?
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It’s like forcing kids to learn the piano. Only a few will naturally gravitate to it and stick with it long enough to continue playing as they get older. However, all kids should learn music theory - how music is constructed and how to read sheet music as these skills will benefit them throughout their entire lives regardless on if they learn how to play a particular instrument.
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And furthermore, a past grand master:
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And inept , too.
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This reminds me of my Game of Life experiments. Due to the way I used fragment shaders, any picture could be used as a starting point, and the outcomes differ depending on the cell resolution.
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93% of my code doesn’t compile.
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echo “I see what you did there!”
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Counterpoint: My elementary school obsession with logo taught me a lot of geometry. Even a little topology, with the wrap around screen. There is a lot of incidental math in programming; for me, early programming led to advanced math.
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No worries. Just click your ruby slippers together, and repeat three times, “There’s no place like chrome”.
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Spoilers if you don’t want to read the article: Perl has a feature called “barewords” where a single word without quotes is regarded as a string. This is to make some parts of the syntax work a bit nicer. Because most of these splatters parse as either a number of a series of letters, because that’s what these machine learning algorithms are trained to recognize, they tend to create “programs” that just consist of a number or a string.
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You just won the thread! 
Wow, we are brothers in spirit in this regard. Also born in ‘81, I was endlessly encouraged to “creatively express” myself (as if that was mutually exclusive with coding or bulding something) to the point where I became a graphic designer and never even considered the possibility of a technical profession (although I have been told many times I was the most structured graphic designer someone had ever worked with).
I ended up starting an engineering degree at age 33 and finishing it a year ago. Your point about lost time really hits home. In raw technical skill and experience, I will just never be able to catch up with the guys who are 15 years younger than me, have been to an engineering focused high school, and have been tinkering with stuff from age 10 as well, so I need to leverage my other prfessional experience somehow.
I think I would have loved to do this stuff in my teens and twenties and it probably would have prevented me from wasting years just bumming around and drinking with no purpose in life.
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Hard same. Man I stupidly listened to my family at key points on this. I was already at University I was almost irked because I had expected CS at all levels to be this awful complex thing to learn. In reality, it wasn’t much worse than learning to write music.
Looking back it was probably because I’m female and I’m good at several creative things so early on I played music etc. Instead of being seen as being a sign I’d be easy to educate, it was seen as proof I would be bad at all things “science” and “math” related because the same person could never be female, creative, and fairly capable of learning a skill. This, despite the fact that several of the women in my family are professional tailors with a really good grasp of geometry.
I have an aunt now, even after a 15 year career, who constantly tells me she “pities” me because because if I’d become a designer I wouldn’t have to just “have a job” to live. Honestly I think this is more of an insult to designers though, which is the other side of that thinking… the idea that creativity and artistic expression are disconnected some how or required to be divorced entirely from any logical or computational thinking and certainly would never be “just a job.” In the mind of people like this, and there are a lot of them, something like making jewelry is seen as radically different than something like machining when in praxis, they have a lot of overlap.
Oddly when living and working as an artist I spent a lot of time measuring the thickness of things, using calipers, and testing chemical reactions… so there’s so much wrong with this dichotomy.
I really don’t get it. These things aren’t opposed to each other, in fact I don’t think I’d be as good at one if I was less good the other.
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The works of Jackson Pollock are the most advanced machine learning application ever developed. Also machine learning sucks.
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When we were kids, the putative rationale for “teaching kids to code” bore little resemblance to the actual value of the “skills” we supposedly learned in the classes. Maybe things are different now, but I don’t know why they would be. Where in the feedback loop is there a mechanism that distinguishes “valuable education happening” from “kids sitting in front of expensive equipment looking busy”?
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