[bpatrianakos]

What is it a step forward for? A popular opinion on HN seems to be that programming should be taught in schools because it's somehow a new basic skill everyone should have? I have to disagree and don't see it being a step forward for anything. Programming after hours, taught as a kind of extracurricular activity seems sufficient to me. There's no need to know how to program a computer. Knowing how to use a computer is the important skill. You don't need to know how to rebuild a transmission to drive a car in the same way you don't need to know how to build a web page to know how to input text into form fields and click a submit button. Those who are curious and interested will learn to build the things we use while others will find it more than enough to simply to know how to use the things the rest of us have built.

I, like anyone else here, am super passionate about programming and it thrills me to be able to make a computer do my bidding but my friends and family don't care how the computer works. That's okay. I know a carpenter. I love living in a well built home but don't really care to know how to build one. Knowing how to work a stud finder to hang a painting is enough for me.

[vezzy-fnord]

Not to mention the common argument that "ubiquitous computing will necessitate that everyone have a high degree of technical literacy" is false. Computers are heading from becoming tools to appliances and circuits. You'll never interact with most of them directly, and when you do, it'll be through an abstracted shell or interface of some sort. The actual internals will be arcane to most, running some form of Contiki, QNX, specifically tailored variant of embedded Linux, or whatnot.

We're already seeing this happen with smartphones and tablets. They offer an ecosystem of applications and network-enabled technologies that are useful to users, but in the end, they're digital handcuffs.

The practical benefits of teaching programming will be outweighed by the sheer incompetence and farcical mess that compromises public education in general. There's no way I, personally, can trust such a system to make anything worthwhile of this.