{"id":29450,"date":"2012-05-18T12:12:53","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T16:12:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/?p=29450"},"modified":"2012-05-18T12:15:13","modified_gmt":"2012-05-18T16:15:13","slug":"reflections-on-computer-programming-for-all-a-new-standard-of-literacy-rowinski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/2012\/05\/18\/reflections-on-computer-programming-for-all-a-new-standard-of-literacy-rowinski\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on &#8220;Computer programming for all: A new standard of literacy&#8221; [Rowinski]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.readwriteweb.com\/hack\/2012\/05\/computer-programming-for-all-a-new-standard-of-literacy.php\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Computer programming for all: A new standard of literacy<\/strong><\/a> &#8212; from readwriteweb.com by Dan Rowinski<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">From DSC:<\/span><\/strong><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #800000;\">Dan Rowinski brings up some solid questions and points here, and I&#8217;ve heard others wrestle with the question whether we should require all students to take programming courses.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">I&#8217;ve taken some computer programming courses and I&#8217;ve had some experience with scripting.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Bottom line: <\/span><\/strong><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>I find it to be a very different way of thinking.<\/strong> Programmers have their shortcuts which are intuitive to them and work very well for them. But the syntax loses many of the rest of us:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\">What happened to that variable? <\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Why did you make it a local vs. a global variable? <\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\">What occurs in this loop? <\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Why did (blank) not make it into the array? <\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Where do I have to declare this variable?<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Why is the syntax written like this?<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Is (blank) a reserved word of the programming language&#8217;s syntax or can I use it?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The reason programmers make a pretty good coin is because most people don&#8217;t like programming and don&#8217;t want to do it. The manner of thinking doesn&#8217;t work for them. It&#8217;s highly-detailed and very unforgiving. Along these lines and by way of example, I find that people in the web world fall into 1 or 2 camps: either they are web <em>developers<\/em> (i.e. the back end world of programming, databases, infrastructure, etc.) or they are web <em>designers<\/em> (i.e. the front end world of graphic design and layout, interface design, interaction design, etc.). It is a rare person who excels at both the front and back ends.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">If we are going to make programming required, we had better do a better job with providing higher-level languages that are more intuitive for the masses.\u00a0 Or we&#8217;ll just discourage many who try their hand at it.\u00a0 And it&#8217;s not that I don&#8217;t value programming &#8212; I do! In fact, I wish that manner of thinking came much easier to me. But it doesn&#8217;t.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Computer programming for all: A new standard of literacy &#8212; from readwriteweb.com by Dan Rowinski From DSC: Dan Rowinski brings up some solid questions and points here, and I&#8217;ve heard others wrestle with the question whether we should require all students to take programming courses. I&#8217;ve taken some computer programming courses and I&#8217;ve had some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,72,204],"tags":[591,606,674],"class_list":["post-29450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-daniel-s-christian","category-programming","tag-computer-science","tag-daniel-s-christian","tag-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29450"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29458,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29450\/revisions\/29458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}