Anyone can cook

Anyone can cook - Chef Gusteau

These days the rage seems anyone can code.

On line attempts to teach coding and computing abound.

We've got Udacity and Coursera trying to bring college level academic offerings to the masses on one extreme and more down to earth "learn to code" efforts with Codecademy getting the most press.

While I applaud any effort to make knowledge more accessible, there are a lot of unanswered questions as to the effectiveness of these latest attempts. Recent posts by Dan Meyer and Audrey Watters have started to raise questions and in my opinion some of the hype has worn off.

At some point, I plan to talk at length about the Udacity and Coursera offerings as well as attempts to increase on line course offerings at the high school levels. I'll talk about the difficulties and dangers that lie ahead.

Today, I'd like to talk about the more vocational offerings such as what Codecademy is doing.

The premise seems to be that anyone can code and that everyone should code. I've been thinking about this for a while and I keep coming back to the question, "what's the endgame?"

Teaching Javascript, HTML and the like narrowly focuses on creating web pages. Even if we forget about difficulties of on line learning that include lack of an interactive feedback loop, lack of follow up,  a narrow curriculum, and the fact that programming beyond the basics is not easy, what's the goal? While I find making an interactive web site cool, I don't know how much it benefits the masses.

One could argue that the mental exercise of programming is a benefit and having a better understanding of how a computer works is a good thing. I'd agree, but what we really could benefit from is a different paradigm in terms of how we approach using computers. A new approach would make even rudimentary scripting skills of greater value to all.

Most of us use computers as program loaders. That is, we sit down, load our word processor, edit something, and exit the word processor. Load our web browser, search the web, exit, load the next program, do something, etc. We might have multiple programs up at the same time, but we use them in isolation.

This is how most people's computing experience has evolved.

With this mindset, I'm not sure how useful coding will be for the masses. People might benefit from some rudimentary scripting a la Excel macros or Google App Scripts, but power users already do this. I don't think that the ability to program within the constraints of scripting individual applications will be a game changer.  To make rudimentary programming skills valuable we must use computers in a way that allows us to use simple techniques to tie together powerful applications.

A few years ago, right before our Christmas break, I stopped over in the Math Chairman's office to wish him a good holiday. Danny was hard at work. He was frantically trying to change the math web site before he left.

The math site was a mess. It consisted of a few dozen loosely arranged folders each with multiple sub folders. Danny was looking in each folder for old sample final exams, each saved as a Tiff file. He would load the file into Photoshop, convert it to another format and save it. He would then change the corresponding HTML file to reference the new file. He had been at it for hours with no end in sight. I said "Danny, I've got this, go home."

I went to my office, wrote a small shell script, maybe 10 lines, hit enter, got on my bike and rode home. When I got there, the job was done.

Now Danny's a really smart guy and he's technically savvy. The difference is that I was taught to try to tie programs together through the command line while he was taught to do things in the Windows/Mac way of loading one program and using it in isolation. I used a simple shell script to tie together a number of powerful Linux applications (find, imagemagick, sed) rather than pointing and clicking over and over again.

I've seen this "program loader" mind set time and time again and in surprising places. My good friend and colleague Gary Rubenstein has done a lot of work debunking the "educational reformers" that are currently in power. Gary had been using Excel to do all his analysis until I pointed out that he could download his data and use simple Python scripts to greater effect. Why was I surprised that Gary wasn't already doing this? Well, in addition to being an amazing math teacher, Gary holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and had worked as a professional programmer in a prior life.

Of course, our life isn't made any easier with closed file formats and vendors that try to isolate their data, but if we could re-educate people to use computers across applications, that would make rudimentary programming useful to all and then indeed there would be a reason for everyone to code.