Code Academy

[HiredGunn]

http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2011/11/28/ts_codecademy_coding.cnnmoney/?iid=GM

This guy thinks Americans need to learn to code because its the literacy of the future.  I think most people will turn away, I dont know any young people interested in coding no matter how 'easy' it is made by a website.  They see jobs migrating overseas and people like me hunched over the computer round the clock and are not interested.

Comments ?

[DG9]

Yet, they have $2.5M in funding, nice. 

[TRexx]

That's  like saying "everyone will own a car, so everyone needs to know how to build an engine."

[Walter Mitty]

http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2011/11/28/ts_codecademy_coding.cnnmoney/?iid=GM

This guy thinks Americans need to learn to code because its the literacy of the future.  I think most people will turn away, I dont know any young people interested in coding no matter how 'easy' it is made by a website.  They see jobs migrating overseas and people like me hunched over the computer round the clock and are not interested.

Comments ?

I once thought that everybody would become sort of an amateur coder.  That was long, long ago.  I think Pascal was the coming language at the time.

Then the VCR came on the scene.  And a lot of people could never learn how to "program" their VCR, or even enter the correct time into them, instead of letting them blink "12:00" all the time.  Today, some people know how to program a tivo.  But they don't learn this in order to build their capacity for critical analysis.  They learn it so they can capture the shows they want. 

There are a lot of things that, in 1980, you had to learn how to program to get done, where today all you have know is how to push a spreadsheet around.   I do think there is a new literacy.  But I don't think coding is it.

[The Gorn]

I saw a comment someplace that said that this concept was the equivalent of the old practice of teaching Latin in schools.

I hardly think so!

[TechTalk]

This guy thinks Americans need to learn to code because its the literacy of the future.

Well, that won't happen, however, assuming that they became aware of its existence somehow I could see some everyday people using the site to checkout what it takes to become a website designer/programmer, smartphone developer, etc.  Anyhow, that is one way I would personally promote the website.

Yet, they have $2.5M in funding, nice.

Did you do a Google search for that info?  I believe the video mentioned that they had 1 million users, so, I imagine that the revenue stream is going to come from advertisements.

[DG9]

Did you do a Google search for that info?

No, they mentioned it in the video that was linked to.

[Walter Mitty]

Latin was a good part of a classical education.  The question might be,  of what value is a classical education?

How far back should our cultural horizon extend?

[Carrie Cobol]

Then the VCR came on the scene.  And a lot of people could never learn how to "program" their VCR, or even enter the correct time into them, instead of letting them blink "12:00" all the time.  Today, some people know how to

To be fair, in most cases with consumer products the fault lies with product design and not the consumer.  You know (hopefully, by now) I don't shy away from coding, and yet I've had VCR's and even copy machines that got the best of me.  If you haven't already, I recommend "The Design of Everyday Things".  I forget the author's name, but he does a brilliant job of explaining how we design things to frustrate the users. 

That aside, I agree it's a stupid suggestion that everybody should learn to code. 

[David Randolph]

Wasn't COBOL designed so that accountants would "be able to code it"?
Almost every spreadsheet has some coding error in it.

[TRexx]

Wasn't COBOL designed so that accountants would "be able to code it"?
Almost every spreadsheet has some coding error in it.

I believe the idea was that COBOL was designed so accountants could read it, thus preventing embezzlement.

[Walter Mitty]

My take has been that COBOL was designed so that business systems analysts would be able to read it.  The idea of a programming language where the body of likely readers is larger than the body of authors is still a revolutionary concept, reardless of whether the extra readers are accountants or analysts.

Most code has some documentation to back it up, but the document and the source code are maintained as separate operations.  As a result it's likely that the documentation will be out of sync, or just plain wrong.