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by panic
3486 days ago
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Ok, but what makes brain surgery a good analogy? Why not replace "writing software" with "hopping on one foot" instead? Most of us own computers that can run software, but we don't own the equipment required to do brain surgery. More people have problems that can be solved by software than can be solved by brain surgery. I think software is more like basic arithmetic: a bit of training (plus the pen and paper you already have) and you can do something yourself that used to require a professional. Of course, software is way more powerful! |
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sbov's car analogy suggestion is apt: a lot of people drive cars, but should they be expected to be able to maintain their own?
A kinda related side observation:
I found my brief stint working with Max/MSP (a visual language typically used by musicians) to be illuminating. This is a tool for non programmers (musicians in this case) to write software for their own use and it succeeds at this. Its kind of like excel for musicians. But, just like excel, the software created by these people, while functionally they work and do what the musician wants, are written in pretty terrible spaghetti code (giving visual programming a bad name in the process), because the users never learned software engineering principles (even simple ones like abstraction).
Just as with excel, this is fine for write-only once-off tools and I certainly do think that more excel-like tools that allow non-programmers to solve their own problems are necessary and will help in software literacy. However, I don't think that these tools or skills will achieve a world where most people can write and modify software in general because they won't have been trained in the software principles we take for granted. Try and debug a large non-programmer-created excel sheet sometime for example. :)
My point is that its not exactly like basic arithmetic, but as you say its not thaaat different either. Yes, some excel-like tools and a bit of training will allow more people to create their own little solutions to their day to day problems, and this is something worth striving for, but it won't be enough to let them create/modify large software in the general case. For that, they need the full blown mathematicians training (or, some of it, anyway).
> you can do something yourself that used to require a professional
I suppose THIS is what the goal is or should be. Not to make everyone a programmer, but to allow people to do more things for themselves that they previously required experts for.