I'm not sure whether this is particularly unique to me or whether it's a common occurrence with everyone, but I'm a huge fan of starting projects. Now this doesn't mean that I get a lot done. On the contrary, most of the people you talk to about me would say that I am quite lazy. However, I enjoy starting things without any regard as to necessarily finishing them.
To that end I am starting up yet another feature called "Rant Corner". This one's mainly just for me to voice my various opinions on any number of things. So, the intro isn't completely useless. I'm not so scatterbrained to begin writing and suddenly change my thoughts... Anyways, this episode of "Rant Corner" is about coding, a topic close to my heart.
It is my opinion that computer programming, coding, hacking, or whatever you want to call it is not that hard. People make coding out to be difficult and cumbersome. However, I think that that's a misconception. While it isn't necessarily easy, coding, like anything worth doing, is about the work you put into it. Of course there are people better than you, but that goes for everything else as well. My thought is that through whatever experience, people get this notion that coding is hard and that there's no way that they can get better or understand it. This obviously doesn't apply solely to coding, but it is definitely a factor in how people react to coding. Of course I'm biased but I really do think that anyone can learn how to code and others do too.
If that video got your attention then that's good. It's nice to hear from really influential people to go out and do something new. Even more when those influential people come from all walks of life. I absolutely agree with the video that coding will only become more important from here on out. It's important to realize that whether you realize it or not, you are likely to interact with tens or hundreds, maybe even thousands of different programs every single day. All of them are written by people who at some point had absolutely no freaking clue what they were doing. As coders, we are poets, we are musicians, we are students and parents, we are like everyone else.
However, I think that there is a misconception about coding that didn't get cleared up through this post thus far and with the video. The video pushes coding education as part of the non-profit code.org, which I do think you should look at if you're interested. The misconception that I'm talking about is more basic than even that we should teach code because it's important. Or perhaps, that reasoning is a cause for the misconception. If you're confused, it was kind of on purpose. My thought is that the biggest misconception with programming is that it's foreign to humans. This thought just seems ludicrous to me though.
"When you're programming, you're teaching possibly the stupidest thing in the entire universe, a computer, how to do something." That quote is from the above video, which if you haven't seen you should, and is said by Gabe Newell who if you aren't aware is the co-founder of Steam, an online videogame distributor. While I can't say that he's wrong, I think that the focus of what he said is in the wrong place. When reading the quote, you can see an emphasis on 'stupidest' and 'teaching' which in my opinion are the wrong places to emphasize and the wrong words to use. Instead, I would much rather liken coding, as well as all subjects, to communication.
I know this might seem strange to you, but if you think about it, all subjects are a way to understand and communicate information. In the US, we learn English to talk to each other and communicate our thoughts. We learn Spanish and German and Chinese and Japanese and French to communicate with people who do not understand English. In order to really appreciate math and science, I think it is more prudent to realize that neither of those is really different from English or Spanish or German or French. The pursuit of math and science is just another way to communicate information, that of the natural world and numerical means, to each other. This is a bit off tangent, but I honestly believe that by splitting class discussion into subjects like English and Math and History just creates unnecessary distinctions between 'subjects' that all serve the same core purpose, that of communication. It's that thought that I think is the main misconception about coding. Coding to me is the act of communicating my ideas with others. It just so happens that my medium is in computers and the necessary act of communicating with a computer is actually what coding is. Like music, the medium by which we communicate our ideas is not solely our words but an external medium (disregard singing or comment on a counter point).
To end, I want to reiterate that I honestly believe anyone can code and that I think that as citizens of a world dominated by digital information that it would be prudent to at least question how the digital world works. There are plenty of resources out there to help you on your path of understanding. In the upcoming months I plan to cover at least a few of them if you're interested but don't know where to begin. Also I want to put it out there again. As coders we are poets, we are musicians, we are students and parents, we are like everyone else... But we can do magic in the eyes of the uninformed.
--CsMiREK
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