[mibbit]

Agree. Kids need to learn logical thought processes and problem solving. They don't need to know how to 'program'.

How do we even know 'programming' will be a relevant skill in 30 years time?

Buy every kid of 3 a tub of Lego bricks (Not a 'set'). That would go a long way to getting them thinking, problem solving, and building stuff.

And don't get me started on the "There aren't enough females in programming" BS rolleyes

FWIW, I would happily sign against this petition. I do not think teaching kids to 'program' at school so early is worthwhile. Programming is an extremely niche career, and anyone who is interested in it can easily learn.

You're likely to bore 90% because they're not interested in learning programming, and the other 10% will have learnt it all at home years ago and will also be bored.

</rant>

[_corbett]

There aren't enough good programmers. Period. In fact there also aren't enough programmers, period.

[mibbit]

Perhaps if more programmers were working on a solution to cancer, instead of a social webapp to allow people to share photos of their dogs...

Not to mention the number of programmers who waste their time creating new languages and frameworks. Then they spend years rewriting everything in node.js or whatever the fashion of the day is.

I'd say there's more than enough programmers.

[saturn]

> who waste their time creating new languages and frameworks

Well that's just laughable, and says more about yourself than any of these allegedly offending third parties. There has been tremendous progress in both frameworks and languages over the last decade. If you can't see that then, well, I don't really know what else to say, other than to perhaps get off your lawn.

[mibbit]

> There has been tremendous progress in both frameworks and languages over the last decade. If you can't see that then, well, I don't really know what else to say, other than to perhaps get off your lawn.

If that's true, can programmers today do things they couldn't do 10 years ago? Can they program faster than they could 10 years ago due to all these innovations in languages and frameworks? I'd say no on both counts.

[saturn]

> I'd say no on both counts.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion I suppose, but I don't know any professional programmer who would even come close to agreeing with you.

[pointyhat]

What about me? :) I agree with him.

So you're suggesting that the time to market of an ASP.Net MVC, NHibernate, Autofac, Razor, SQL Server application is going to be lower than a classic asp and SQL server application?

[pointyhat]

But 99.9% of these innovations don't help the world. They help a small subset of a small subset of a small subset of problems from a small subset of a small subset of a small subset of society.

Compare to if someone worked out how to stop Neurofibromatosis dead in its tracks for example (a condition my youngest daughter has), they'd give 1 in 3000 people a better chance.

People get a Jesus complex because they build a tool that a vocal minority uses.

[saturn]

Even if we accept your claim that only 1 in 1000 inventions help the world, which I think is pessimistic, that's still progress. What would you rather people do? Not invent?

A programmer writing a new framework might not directly help cure Neurofibromatosis but they might make it slightly easier for another programmer, which is then inspired to work on his program, which saves a medical researcher a few minutes and gives him the time he needs to have his breakthrough. Or maybe a better search result gave him what he needs. Technology is cumulative. Criticising people because they're not working on your favoured project is pretty lame.

[pointyhat]

I agree with your sentiment but I see the other side of it. Technology is cumulative but noise slows down decision making and fragments knowledge.

The world does not need 200 programming languages, 1000 javascript frameworks, 500 different web servers and 20-odd social platforms which exist only to boost the ego of the originator who can market their idea better than othersr. It needs some concise, un-fancy-looking tools that are fit for purpose and can be used as a common ground for communicating ideas. There is so much fragmentation it's unbelievable.

Everyone thinks they can do better, yet no-one delivers any real efficiency improvement.

TBH going back in time, I can still deliver the same output as node.js with classic ASP/Jscript from 1998 arguably with less code and time spent.

Back on the subject of med research; they tend to still use Perl, bits of sticky tape and TI89/92 calculators a lot apparently (word of mouth from a friend who works in tissue sample analysis).

[pointyhat]

Give this man a medal. This is exactly the problem with this planet.

[pointyhat]

Personally, I think there are plenty of good programmers.

Unfortunately there are a lot of problems which people like to solve over and over again...

[_corbett]

you should see some of the code that smart, hardworking and logical people end up writing in the sciences because they are 10 years behind in programming education and experience. then the next generation of PhD students rolls in and rinse, repeat.