M. Mitchell Waldrop in his book The Dream Machine (Viking: 2001) says that he made the argument that programming was a fundamental intellectual skill, like mathematics. He argued that computers �will participate in almost every intellectual transaction that goes on in the university.�
They also participate in every commercial transaction in every supermarket. Should check-out staff learn to program?
Hang on a second. Electricity is much more pervasive than computers. Everybody needs to learn about Maxwells equations first and before they use any electricity from a nuclear power station they need to learn quantum mechanics. I just don't understand how our ancestors were able to move to an agrarian way of life without any knowledge of plant photosynthesis and the process of nuclear fusion that caused our sun to generate photons.
I don't think the point for me is that learning to program helps people use computers. What is a lot more interesting is that there are (embodied) thoughts you can think by programming that you cannot think any other way, just as there are thoughts you can only think with writing, sculpture, maths, a violin, etc. This is how a computer is different to a car, or fishing - programming computers provides a *unique* means of *self*-expression, the possibilities of which should not be denied anyone.
Alan Kay (passim) and others say that programming, and the associated thought processes, teaches independent problem-solving to kids - gives them broad skills and tools to discover (i.e. actively, not passively) and tackle a wide variety of problems and solutions.
Ken Perlin is working on this very thing. From http://www.gamegirladvance.com/archives/2003/03/04/ the_destiny_of_games.html
"In a breathtakingly dense five minutes, [Perlin] critiqued the culture of passivity and argued for universal procedural literacy to combat it. Citizens who can *make* things, he said, would understand that they can affect the world; if we institute programming languages as part of the general education of all, we will be helping to guide a revolution in the way people think and act. Imagine if a child knew how procedural thinking worked - imagine if programming became like writing, like literacy, not a technical skill learned by engineers, but a fundamental language of self-expression naturally used by writers, artists, musicians, anyone. Way beyond open source, it was a manifesto for democratizing access to cultural participation at the most basic level."
Of course, hardly anyone seems to think that programming languages in their current incarnations are at all fit for such revolutionary purposes, but that is for a separate discussion.
-- Greg Turner
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