Always good advice, in any field of endeavor. Sadly, it doesn’t happen that much in education these days.
6 thoughts on “Don’t Learn To Code”
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Always good advice, in any field of endeavor. Sadly, it doesn’t happen that much in education these days.
Comments are closed.
Peers (iron sharpening iron) can train thinking. Blog comments being integral these days.
Indeed. Scientific publishing needs to migrate to a model like a cross between Wikipedia and arXiv; no referees, but the peers are the entire internet in the comments section. Citation by trackback and pingback, and hashtags in the abstract. Something like that would increase the tempo and quality of science.
In a world where Big Brother really is watching, understanding code is the tool for fighting back against the State. Code is the tool of the revolutiionary, Ron Paulian or otherwise.
I don’t think the point of the piece is to not know code, just that it is not sufficient.
As is evidenced by a lot of stupidity that comes out of Silicon Valley.
I self-taught Perl, shell scripting, cron, and VBA in various jobs over the years. I hand-write a lot of macros in Excel and Access to do my work for me. I used to be of the mindset that, “I know how to code, a new programming language is just about learning the semantics. Give me a good O’Reilly book, and Google, and I can get where I need to go with any new language.” And, to an extent, that is true.
But object-oriented languages still baffle me, especially Java. They tried to teach us Ada in undergrad (because 95% of our CS program was made up of Rockwell-Collins employees), but that didn’t get me any farther along in understanding OOP, because I lost interest in being a coder by the time I got to that course.
I’ve decided that I’m perfectly happy not being able to develop Android apps myself, even though I have plenty of ideas on things I would like to be able to do. The knowledge of how to solve problems using algorithms, loops, etc. is enough to keep me happy and productive.
The textbook approach to object oriented design doesn’t fit everything. Working in a language like java sometimes you have to shoehorn code which doesn’t follow the textbook approach into the language constraints.