Teaching our kids to code: a clarification
[This is a followup to Teaching our kids to code.]
When I say that I yearn for a mass-algorate society, I don't mean a society in which everyone has the level of knowledge of today's professional programmers. We live in a mass-literate society, but we don't expect everyone to be able to write novels or sonnets or in-depth analyses of the politics of the Middle East; we live in a mass-numerate society, but we don't expect everyone to be able to prove Stokes' Theorem or calculate cohomology groups. We do expect (almost) everyone to be able to read a newspaper, write a note for the babysitter, and write an SMS to tell their other half that they're staying in the pub for another round unavoidably delayed due to badgers on the line; we do expect (almost) everyone to be able to do simple arithmetic and make sense of graphs. Similarly, a mass-algorate society probably wouldn't expect everyone to be able to write an operating system kernel, a compiler or a game engine, but it probably would expect everyone to be able to write simple scripts to automate repetitive computational tasks, to do basic data-mining, or to control machinery.
I think that this is within the capabilities of almost everyone, given a sufficiently supportive infrastructure (which we don't have at the moment, but which we'd inevitably develop as more and more people become algorate). I'd love to live in that world.
When I say that I yearn for a mass-algorate society, I don't mean a society in which everyone has the level of knowledge of today's professional programmers. We live in a mass-literate society, but we don't expect everyone to be able to write novels or sonnets or in-depth analyses of the politics of the Middle East; we live in a mass-numerate society, but we don't expect everyone to be able to prove Stokes' Theorem or calculate cohomology groups. We do expect (almost) everyone to be able to read a newspaper, write a note for the babysitter, and write an SMS to tell their other half that they're staying in the pub for another round unavoidably delayed due to badgers on the line; we do expect (almost) everyone to be able to do simple arithmetic and make sense of graphs. Similarly, a mass-algorate society probably wouldn't expect everyone to be able to write an operating system kernel, a compiler or a game engine, but it probably would expect everyone to be able to write simple scripts to automate repetitive computational tasks, to do basic data-mining, or to control machinery.
I think that this is within the capabilities of almost everyone, given a sufficiently supportive infrastructure (which we don't have at the moment, but which we'd inevitably develop as more and more people become algorate). I'd love to live in that world.