[rtens]

I thought long and hard about a apt analogy and decided on "literacy" because I'm hoping that using computers as a medium for formulating and exchanging ideas would have a similar effect as reading and writing had.

I can very well imagine that a couple of hundred years ago people thought that writing was some niche knowledge and it's perfectly fine to leave that to the monks.

My goal is not to make everybody a professional software engineer just like everybody should not be a professional author. But people should be able to use the medium to discover and understand powerful ideas.

[akkartik]

Interestingly, that is precisely the way I've been framing the problem for several years now. For example, here's a comment from a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8308881. And one from a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12668086.

"I think we're in a preliterate state with programming: it's hard for anyone to quickly look at a program listing and answer the basic sorts of comprehension questions we might test school kids on for prose.

"What we find easy is to read programs we wrote. Recently."

Here's my manifesto based on the same starting insight as you: http://akkartik.name/about. And my project (with one other collaborator): https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Nice to meet ya! I'd love to chat more at some point once the HN rush dies down, perhaps over email (address in profile). We seem to be attacking the same problem but from very different directions. I'm focusing on new methodologies rather than tools, and heading down to fix the foundations before creating empowering interfaces on top. Cross-pollination of ideas would be useful.

[rtens]

Nice to meet ya as well! Your material looks very exciting. I'll drop you an email once I've digested it all.