I don't understand.
We've spent thousands of years, using 99.9% of able-bodied people for farming, hunting or some other food-gathering activities. Only selected few could afford to NOT work in farming.
Even America, just 200 years ago had 90% of its population working as farmers.
Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Sure, the food industry is not always honest,not always as good as your own home-grown food, but still - it allowed us to do something else with our lives, and pushed our societies an order of magnitude ahead.
As much as people should APPRECIATE farming, I don't think that everyone should do it. We produce enough food as it is.
We should teach kids how to code however, not because we need more programmers(which we do,but I digress) - but because it's the easiest way to introduce kids to logical, technical-like thinking. That way we can have more mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, engineers - people who we can afford to keep alive(almost literally) because they do not need to grown their own food anymore! They can sit at their desks for the whole day, thinking how to make the world better, instead of looking at how the crops grow.
I would say - why not give kids both? Is it too much to ask? Show them how vegetables are grown, how animals are cared for and how are they slaughtered, but at the same time, yes, please teach them how to code.
I run a small farm, and I've been a professional programmer for about 12 years. I agree with what you say - kids should definitely have the opportunity to learn both. Of my two pursuits above, farming is much newer to me and I've found an amazing amount of skill transfer from the world of programming to the world of farming. Granted, my sheep don't understand when I yell at them in haskell, but the approaches to problem solving, whole-system thinking, and consideration of edge cases I think are enormously beneficial in almost any profession.
I do think that today's kids would benefit not only from knowing a thing or two about how to raise some food (very different from actual "farming") and also from having much more contact with the natural world.
I also think that many kids would benefit from learning the "art" side of programming - the stuff that's fun and interesting, like solving puzzles, appreciation of the hard-to-define idea of elegance, reverse engineering, etc. Nothing else I've learned to do has had quite the impact on my ability to consider many angles in a situation and reason a way to get from one state to another, and at least for me it's been a fun process to learn it all.
My real complaint when anybody says "Everybody should have to learn X," is that I think it should be "Everybody should have a chance to learn X." Coding was the best path for me to learn to think about complex, abstract things and apply that thinking to the real world (including farming). For others, it may not be so.
Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again?
Look at me exercising a form of conspicuous consumption (the time of a highly educated profeasional) that my class and culture peers think are praiseworthy. Let me say everyone should indulge in my hobby. Let's look down on those who don't together.
"Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? "
Because most of them have no idea just how grim the life of a subsistence peasant farmer really is, and how that differs from the lucky few who get to sell boutique "organic" produce to rich people.
> Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again?
Because people forgot in a hanfdul of years (that's what it is, compared to the span of human history) what was slowly learned over the course of centuries and millennia. And the result? That kids nowadays almost think that foods magically pops out from the shelf at the supermarket.
Specialization (in the sense that nobody does everything, everyone does his small part) is definitely good, unless you forget what everything is about and depend on others too much.
Nobody expect people to go back to farming, but at least to know how is done. You never know.
I don't believe computer programing is a good way to teach logical thinking. Sociology, Philosophy and Literature are better alternatives.
Coding only makes you better micro managers, "thinking of efficient ways to make idiots do things you like".
Also teaching agriculture or other physical goods producing craftsmanship to kids would make them better at real world challenges. Modern society seems to be run by digital arts but it's just an illusion of how we live.
"This thing #{X} that I am inexperienced at is much harder than this thing #{Y} I spent years doing because I am experienced at #{Y} and have some idea how to do it and thus it feels comfortable.
Why, I am going to go so far as to talk down everybody who still does #{Y}, partly because I'm somewhat burnt out on it, and partly because my comparative experience makes me feel like it's easy compared to #{X}."
Where:-
* X, Y are very broad fields in which there is a whole range of tasks which span from the very simple to the insanely difficult,
* X, Y both revolutionised the world at different points in human history, X before Y.
Programmers' world is populated with very abstract concepts that they use to reason and draw conclusions. I think this post discuss the applicability of this reasoning outside of the virtual sphere.
So assigning farming to #{X}, programming to #{Y} and then reasoning over X and Y without considering the reality of farming and programming is surely not the proper way to address this problem.
In other words, I disagree and I think this post is interesting.
I've been involved in farming for most of my life and now, as an adult, have my own operation. I also program professionally. With considerable experience in both, I still think farming is the more challenging of the two and believe that farming does require more problem solving over a wide range of disciplines.
When the whole learn to code push came to my attention, I also wondered if farming would be a better option for achieving the claimed goals.
X indeed revolutionised the world. Y just made porn delivery and commerce better. It's not even clear at this point if it had any effect (besides negative) to the global intellectual climate.
I don't think we should encourage anyone to do anything. We should discourage them.
Let me explain...
I take my example from this traditional practice of Rabbis: never accept a convert until they have been turned away twice before. Make them make 3 attempts to show their determination. Why? Because Judaism is hard. If they're not committed, they'll either give up or do just enough to satisify the minimum requirements, wasting everyone's time.
Same thing with programming. Building real applications that deliver sustainable value over time is hard. It pretty much takes all that you've got and can take years to reach excellence.
Every time I see another way to learn how to be a programmer (now that there's money in the game, they seem to be popping up everywhere), I have two immediate reactions: 1. How cool is that. I wish I had that years ago. 2. No! We had enough bad programmers who are doing it for all the wrong reasons.
I believe the most important difference between an excellent programmer and everyone else is not intelligence, education, emotional state, or work ethic (although all of these help). The most important thing is a burning desire to build.
Someone with this burning desire won't not need to be encouraged. You won't be able to stop them. Someone without it would be better off doing something else.
We don't need more programmers. (Only IT execs who akin programmers to envelope stuffers think that.) We need more excellent programmers.
The best way to get more excellent programmers? Discourage everyone so that only the most determined can make it.
Our industry, our craft, and most of all, are code repositories would be much better off.
We're talking about kids here, and I feel like you've turned this discussion into a personal rant against people who want to cash in on the popularity of programming without really putting in the effort. Discouraging kids is a terrible, terrible idea. If my daughter shows even the smallest interest in programming, I will encourage the heck out of that interest. Same goes for anything worthwhile she shows an interest in.
Reminds of what Seinfeld would tell kids who told him they wanted to be comedians. He would say 'No you don't, you'll never make it.' If they could take the criticism and go at it regardless, then maybe they could do what it takes to make it (the hard grueling path of being a standup comedian). Analogous to the startup world.
Am I the only one who reads this as selfish, juvenile elitism?
Here's how I see it: Programming is a relatively young discipline. It's not really that hard, we just make it artificially difficult with bad tools, and artificially exclusive with various first world and Anglo-centric measures. We desperately need fresh perspectives. Most of what is built is rebuilt, constantly, with new bugs. As a profession, we tend to lack insight. We need more eyes, particularly fresh eyes, not 'experienced', elitist code-Rabbis.
Ugh. You couldn't be more wrong. We expect everyone to have a basic education about "how the world works". For example, there are increased calls to have the basics of personal finance be something that is taught in schools because the world is getting more complicated with respect to personal finance, and this is uncontroversial - knowing basic personal finance is a good thing. To use a well-known quote, "software is eating the world." Why is knowing how to code somehow different?
The other side of the coin is that children who aren't exposed to programming will never know how it feels to build software.
And it goes further. People without an education or experience in software development or engineering aren't able to come up with good ideas about what to build because they aren't able to grasp the possibilities of what technology enables.
That feeling you're talking about in regards to building stuff is not something that you're born with, but rather something that grows on you by building stuff.
So no, I don't agree with you. We shouldn't force anybody to do anything of course, but the responsibility of a good educational system is to open up horizons, which means encouraging children to explore as much as possible.
Graphic design went through this a while back: "Woe! Our industry is flooded with people who've no aptitude." Desktop publishing resulted in a metric crapton of nasty designs for a while. But subsequently we've seen a Cambrian explosion of great looking stuff. The same thing is happening with video production right now. YouTube is overfilled with stuff no one wants to watch but already we're seeing innovative stuff come out as people with access to previously unavailable tools learn how to use them effectively.
For a while this probably means that our code repos might be filled with nasty stuff, but I'm convinced we'll be better off for it in the long run.
You're underestimating the value of basic coding skills to non-programmers. It's a little like saying programmers should never learn how to improve their social skills, because they'll never be have the determination to reach Bill Clinton's level of charisma.
I am decidedly not a programmer. I don't know what an object is. I haven't learned the first bit of CS. My code would probably make you want to gouge your eyes out. And yet, it's saved/earned companies millions of dollars.
Or, we could do things that encourage this burning desire, perhaps?
It certainly seems possible to teach in a way that kindles a life long love of programming, rather than leaving things to blind caprice - most groups just don't even seem to realise this might be a good idea.
In competitive environments, low-tech occupations tend to lose as a group.
Take any mass farming. Tea collectors, for example, I believe they're paid so little they are in constant poverty. Why are they paid that way? They collect all the tea people around the world drink. Paying them the increase of the cost of a tea bag by 1 cent will make them comparatively rich. Why isn't it done? They have no bargaining power. Anyone can collect tea badly enough, this is true for most agricultural labour. It is physically hard but you can teach it in half an our. So they can always be easily replaced either with local population or with some illegal immigrants.
In the developed world, a lot of people just pass documents around and make phone calls. It's the sophistication of zooplankton and physically much less demanding than agricultural jobs, but you can't quite teach it to anyone in the world in half an hour - you need locals for this (they connect to other people and need to fit culturally) and they need some even very basic skills. So they get paid with actual money you can buy things with.
Take coders. Training a coder is not easy and it even requires some aptitude. Thus, even mediocre coders can often command their rules to their employers. And great coders are true citizens of the world, employable anywhere on their terms.
So, to make farming cool we have to make it high-tech.
Another problem is that farming doesn't seem very profitable even on the large / capital scale, because the barrier to entry is so low.
> Another problem is that farming doesn't seem very profitable even on the large / capital scale, because the barrier to entry is so low.
For what it is worth, I make considerably more money per hour farming than I do programming, and I get paid quite well to be a programmer.
With farming, however, the barrier to entry is actually quite high. That barrier being access to capital. It is the massive debt any normal person has to take on to even think about farming that cripples most.
Programmers are quite lucky that you only need one reasonably affordable tool, which almost everyone already owns, and you are eligible to enter the market.
This just goes to show you have very little knowledge of how farming is done in the US. Here farming is very high tech, in fact they have some of the most advanced land navigation and machinery there is!
Also your argument is based on harvesting of a product, only one aspect of farming, that is manly produced in third world countries.
Most here don't appreciate how hard it is (especially if you're inexperienced)
Do people still grow beans using a cotton in a cup? Do they still teach that at schools? That's basically the 'hello world' of farming
Of course, depends on what you are doing, type of plants, inside a greenhouse or in an open field, the scale of it etc. Not to mention raising animals. That's very hard as well
It's unsurprising that it's getting ever more 'industry like'. You take a lot of people and specialize in only a few crops, so you can have profits that work out. Machines are expensive, fertilizer, soil analysis, etc, etc
And then there's a climate issue, too much rain, too cold, too warm and you miss the mark.
The big point is actually that currently we (as in, the whole world) have far more farmers than we need (especially in the developing countries) and less coders than we need. And in the future, automation and coders will ensure that we will need even less farmers.
How much population do we really need to tend all global arable land using modern methods machinery? Currently in developed countries it's somewhere near 2%, depending on the local crops used; in time it may be 1% as more and more things can now be done by machines. Countries such as India and China currently have hundreds of millions of farmers; but the same result can be produced by half or less people with farming methods currently used in USA/EU. Right now a lot of modern grain farm work consists of driving equipment around all your fields - and self-driving tractors will eliminate even that remainder "manual" work.
I'm currently an A Level student in the UK that's been hacking on software and hardware projects for the last 6-7 years. I decided to go to the June RHoK event in Southampton and worked on a new project called WaterMe with 4 others that takes open satellite imagery from NASA and outputs an index of water content and foliage and more in the area over time from a user friendly interface. Also making available the data for researchers and hackers for other awesome projects.
After the Hackathon we were accepted into a humanitarian incubator called GWOB (Geeks Without Bounds) which has put our team in contact with many spectacular personalities and guidance which has intorduced me into areas of mapping, open data, funding, advertising, additional technologies and even quad-copters/balloons/flying-machines.
We are still developing the product (now closed source) and are hoping to look for investment in the near future to run the product at scale to provide for farmers, researchers and anyone interested in things such as drought and glaciers amongst others.
Needless to say this has one of the best experiences of my life so far and is way more rewarding than any freelance work I've done as just make money jobs.
...NOT!!! I know you Americans tend to see having a basic little vegetable garden as "black magic", but it's really something one can learn in under a week and based on this knowledge grow things to the point that one can actually produce enough for sale and maybe run a small business! But's you can't learn programming well enough to actually get any benefit out of it, let alone actually make a living from this alone, in a week! Yeah, I pick my food from the supermarket just like you, but I spent enough of my childhood at a farm know that things are really easy (at least if don't try running your little garden as a real business and get enough profit to cover marketing, distribution etc. - then shit gets really complicated), basically high-school biology is more than enough and everything can be found in any book or googled in minutes and you have tools that come with all the needed instructions and seed, herbicedes etc.
It all boils to this funny observation: plants can grow by themselves, you just need to guide things a bit to get the desired outcome! otoh, computers don't program themselves, code doesn't write itself - you have to do it, and this is why it's hard and also fun and rewarding (for a comparison, starting to learn how to farm by writing the genetic code of the organism's you'll be farming - ok, it's and orders of magnitude exaggeration, but it's still the closest way farming could be alike to coding).
This article presents a nuanced point, and I agree with it.
My response to this quote by Steve Burgess (not the author):
"Why are programmers granted such high status and wealth in our society for living in a self-created self-indulgant intellectual world of constant escapism- and yet farmers are regarded with such distain when they operate on the most important boundary between society and the biosphere?"
Farmers have historically played with the fears of mankind and have lobbying power that rivals big tobacco in many countries.
"More moneyz for the farmers or everyone will starve to death."
They also tend to use somewhat stereotypical stuff depicting themselves as heroes that feed the homeland which just rubs me the wrong way.
Add the "leave this farmland empty and make more money than actually farming on it" government handout abuse (+ all sorts of economic meddling that makes very little sense) and you pretty much get the mixture of why I don't grant farmers a high status by default.
Big industry farming is also fairly disgusting. I'm not really an animal rights type of guy and more of the "whatever humans eat animals such is life" kind of school but what is happening in industry farming makes me pretty sick.
[I'm obviously aggregating over all farmers here but by and large I wouldn't start out assuming a farmer was noble]
Edit: that's obviously way off topic. My answer to the OP would be...teach kids to enjoy learning and exploring and not some specific craft. The rest will follow automatically.
Programming as a craft works well because it tends to force you to learn and explore as a side effect (same for anything scientific really)
"Why are [...] farmers are regarded with such distain [...]?"
They are? I haven't seen people feel that way, so I'm kind of surprised to read this. Some references to evidence that supports this claim might be useful.
Funny they should mention this, when I first went to college I majored in Horticulture, the idea being that I would one day be an organic farmer.
Turns out that's a lousy way of learning the trade. They'll teach you a little bit of the hands-on stuff, but pretty soon it's all plant physiology. If you really wanted to learn, you had to go out and farm, not learn how the Krebs cycle works.
So, after having worked as a farmhand for a few other farmers, I dropped out, tried share-farming for a while. Worked well, other than the fact that the drought in Texas was breaking records, which wasn't good if you're growing vegetables, not to mention the high-temps and a lack of a greenhouse. In 6 months I was pretty much done for.
Still, I learned a lot, so much so that I figured I was probably smart enough to major in something more intellectually stimulating, so I went with engineering, found out I like programming a lot, and eventually settled in Computer Science.
Long story short, I think he's onto something, farming isn't just physically demanding, it requires thought, especially if you don't want to use nasty chemicals. I may not be the best coder in the bunch, but I've found I can figure it out a little faster than classmates who brag that they learned their first language when they were in grade school. I learned my first language, C, when I was 21.
Yeah I too went to ag school and then got into coding.
It's pretty hard to be a farmer coming out of ag school unless your family has a farm already for you to run since the entry costs are so high. I still produce a lot of my own food via a family farm, but god I'm glad it's not my main job. I make a mistake when coding and things can be bad, but usually they are OK especially if you have revision control and a good workflow.
I make a mistake farming and things die and I have nothing to eat or sell. Then there are just random inexplicable things that screw you over. Yes, this happens in IT, see what happened with Cloudflare this week, but imagine if that lasted for months, even years, and you could never switch providers- that's how badly weather can screw you over.
I worked in academia IT for a bit and took archaeology classes for fun. It's no surprise that ancient farmer's bones have markers like pitting that indicate periods of severe malnutrition.
What will the problems of the next generation be, and how do we prepare them for that? On the face of it the next few generations face huge issues. The only thing we know for certain is that the way we live now is totally unsustainable in the long run, and that new solutions will need to be found to old and unglamorous problems. More localised food production might be one way to help them through what looks like a turbulent few decades, by building in resilience to political and economic shocks.
Is it still valuable to teach kids to code, in the same way that it might have been in the 1980s? I think so, and for the same reasons why growing your own food might also be a good idea. It makes you more independent and more resilient, and reduces your dependency upon increasingly centralised systems which are vulnerable to failure or being co-opted by parties who don't care about your interests. As time goes by code makes up the fundamental infrastructure of life, so who writes and controls that code, and what their priorities are, becomes a critical question.
"The only thing we know for certain is that the way we live now is totally unsustainable in the long run"
We "know" this how, exactly? Malthus was saying the same thing in 1798. Paul Ehrlich was saying the same thing in 1968.
They were both dead wrong.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
"Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles...the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979...the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics."
>> Why are programmers granted such high status and wealth in our society for living in a self-created self-indulgent intellectual world of constant escapism
We know the specifics of the answer to this, I'd like to answer this in a general sort of way -
in Alvin Toffer's 'Third wave' way of looking at the world, the integrators in a division-of-labour system are its rulers. Programmers give you tools to integrate.
Remember, the key themes of the the second wave are :
"The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy."
So you see , programmers are actually bureaucracy-engineers, creating the process and flow and channels for the industries of the world to play together
> The programming part is nothing more than a hammer to a builder or a scalpel to a surgeon.
We need to remember that not all "tools" are equal. "Tools" like math, science, and philosophy provide leverage for future understanding/interacting with the world. The "tool" of farming provides the ability grow food efficiently. Important but not the same thing. The idea behind code.org and the like is that, hey, maybe programming is more foundational than it is just a trade for programmers to sit in cubicles and do all day.
If you want to argue that programming and farming belong on the same plane, you need to argue that farming provides as much leverage as coding for general life tasks, or else why this leverage doesn't matter. Implying that programming is somehow a morally corrupt activity because of its "escapism" and links to advertising and high frequency trading feels a bit inadequate to me.
I think what most people are missing is that it's not about creating more programmers as much as it is about teaching people how to think analytically. When you're programming you try to solve a high level problem using low level techniques. The actual programming is the part where you find a solution for the high level problem with your low level tools.
So again, it is not just about writing code. It is about how to approach problems and finding viable solutions, no matter what the form of the problem is. It could as well be: "How can I speed up the harvesting on my farm?". Knowing programming helps us in many more situations than just writing code.
I agree with your point. But to riff off dschiptsov's comment, how do you define "programming" (as opposed to, say, "coding"), and how does knowing programming help you answer questions like "How can I speed up harvesting on my farm?"
I would call the ability to understand and solve those kinds of problems analysis, not programming. It used to be the case that "systems analyst" and "programmer" were two different job titles; at this point, they've largely merged, but I still see them as two different skill sets. (And then there's "software engineer" which is a whole other can of worms.)
I divide my days into coding and planting seeds+farming, and i like very much both tasks. My opinion is that there is a bandwidth for everything, but kids should follow their passions and do what they love best.
When i'll be a parent i'll teach them this because it's lovely, and that ! oh but this skill is amazing also ! There is bandwidth for most everything but above all your kids will copy you and see what you love and probably get inspired to follow their own path.
So teach them to do what they love and love what they do ! and teach them to feel happy above all. But teach them by being that example yourself !
> Programming is simply a tool, a way to abstract a problem and enable it to be solved or solved more efficiently. […] The programming part is nothing more than a hammer to a builder or a scalpel to a surgeon.
That sounds like a massive understatement of the actual power of electronic computers. They are the universal mental tool. The tool that can do any sufficiently specified cognitive task. There is no such physical tool yet (though we could hope for Drexlerian nanotechnology).
Programming is the way we control this tool. I do not know of any greater power.
The bit teaching kids to farm seems like a straw man regarding what is most important to learn. Learning to farm and learning to code are not mutually exclusive, and may even require overlapping skills (manipulating an environment with a given set of constraints to yield the most favorable results).
Yet, the OP's conclusion presents a stronger argument for learning to code than learning to farm: "What code.org promotes is teaching kids how to look at problems, analyse them and present them in a way that captures what they are trying to solve. It promotes teaching kids how to use a new tool that can assist them to devise solutions to whatever problems they desire. Most importantly it promotes teaching them a tool that they can use to express and communicate this."
This seems like an even stronger endorsement for learning to code than anything even in the code.org video.
I think the real underlying sentiment in this post is to not learn to code for the wrong reasons, but kids don't care about future rewards like "vats of riches, shiny things and scantily clad women." They gravitate to things that are fun and that capture their attention in the here and now. Making a sprite spin in a circle in Scratch was all it took to get my 4 year old nephew's eyes to light up. He can decide one day whether he'd rather code for altruism or profit (again, not that they are mutually exclusive).
Every once in a while I still recite this one poem shared with me back when I was quite impressionable; it's a fascinating comparison between farming and coding.
For the record, I agree that our interaction with this biosphere (and hopefully, Mars soon) vastly outweighs the significance of github. No offense intended to github, just perspective.
Part of it:
Writing turns our deepest loam
Planting roses with the words
From indigenous tangle
Visitors, though, not landlords
I'm surprised by the article really. For decades geeks have been mocked and ridiculed in society and the media. Fast forward to this last decade the wider world understands geeks and the geeks' work has made lives better (in some ways) for a lot of people. And now they are the criminals?
There isn't a god-like status, the internet and blogs are built by nerds so yes they will have their praise there, much as you will see farmers being praised in Africa where i'm from. Geeks aren't even called geeks because 1. they are far apart 2. no one even understands what we do in the first place. We all almost know each other because there's so few of us
Of course we need farmers, we need doctors, ventriloquists: we need all sorts of trades but when you find a different calling don't make yourself feel better by ridiculing other people's careers.
Or maybe, just maybe, because tech is the hype where you are and in your media you feel other trades are being neglected. Whether that's true or not for WHERE YOU LIVE i don't know. I do understand your frustration with the code.org campaign though, which makes it seem like kids won't get identity documents because they can't code (lol). But for the rest of the world outside the valley? We actually need more coders.
[+] [-] gambiting|13 years ago|reply
Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Sure, the food industry is not always honest,not always as good as your own home-grown food, but still - it allowed us to do something else with our lives, and pushed our societies an order of magnitude ahead.
As much as people should APPRECIATE farming, I don't think that everyone should do it. We produce enough food as it is. We should teach kids how to code however, not because we need more programmers(which we do,but I digress) - but because it's the easiest way to introduce kids to logical, technical-like thinking. That way we can have more mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, engineers - people who we can afford to keep alive(almost literally) because they do not need to grown their own food anymore! They can sit at their desks for the whole day, thinking how to make the world better, instead of looking at how the crops grow.
I would say - why not give kids both? Is it too much to ask? Show them how vegetables are grown, how animals are cared for and how are they slaughtered, but at the same time, yes, please teach them how to code.
[+] [-] aethertap|13 years ago|reply
I do think that today's kids would benefit not only from knowing a thing or two about how to raise some food (very different from actual "farming") and also from having much more contact with the natural world.
I also think that many kids would benefit from learning the "art" side of programming - the stuff that's fun and interesting, like solving puzzles, appreciation of the hard-to-define idea of elegance, reverse engineering, etc. Nothing else I've learned to do has had quite the impact on my ability to consider many angles in a situation and reason a way to get from one state to another, and at least for me it's been a fun process to learn it all.
My real complaint when anybody says "Everybody should have to learn X," is that I think it should be "Everybody should have a chance to learn X." Coding was the best path for me to learn to think about complex, abstract things and apply that thinking to the real world (including farming). For others, it may not be so.
[+] [-] barry-cotter|13 years ago|reply
Look at me exercising a form of conspicuous consumption (the time of a highly educated profeasional) that my class and culture peers think are praiseworthy. Let me say everyone should indulge in my hobby. Let's look down on those who don't together.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|13 years ago|reply
Because most of them have no idea just how grim the life of a subsistence peasant farmer really is, and how that differs from the lucky few who get to sell boutique "organic" produce to rich people.
[+] [-] Heliosmaster|13 years ago|reply
Because people forgot in a hanfdul of years (that's what it is, compared to the span of human history) what was slowly learned over the course of centuries and millennia. And the result? That kids nowadays almost think that foods magically pops out from the shelf at the supermarket.
Specialization (in the sense that nobody does everything, everyone does his small part) is definitely good, unless you forget what everything is about and depend on others too much.
Nobody expect people to go back to farming, but at least to know how is done. You never know.
[+] [-] fsniper|13 years ago|reply
Coding only makes you better micro managers, "thinking of efficient ways to make idiots do things you like".
Also teaching agriculture or other physical goods producing craftsmanship to kids would make them better at real world challenges. Modern society seems to be run by digital arts but it's just an illusion of how we live.
[+] [-] singular|13 years ago|reply
Why, I am going to go so far as to talk down everybody who still does #{Y}, partly because I'm somewhat burnt out on it, and partly because my comparative experience makes me feel like it's easy compared to #{X}."
Where:-
* X, Y are very broad fields in which there is a whole range of tasks which span from the very simple to the insanely difficult,
* X, Y both revolutionised the world at different points in human history, X before Y.
[+] [-] bnegreve|13 years ago|reply
So assigning farming to #{X}, programming to #{Y} and then reasoning over X and Y without considering the reality of farming and programming is surely not the proper way to address this problem.
In other words, I disagree and I think this post is interesting.
[+] [-] randomdata|13 years ago|reply
When the whole learn to code push came to my attention, I also wondered if farming would be a better option for achieving the claimed goals.
[+] [-] coldtea|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edw519|13 years ago|reply
Let me explain...
I take my example from this traditional practice of Rabbis: never accept a convert until they have been turned away twice before. Make them make 3 attempts to show their determination. Why? Because Judaism is hard. If they're not committed, they'll either give up or do just enough to satisify the minimum requirements, wasting everyone's time.
Same thing with programming. Building real applications that deliver sustainable value over time is hard. It pretty much takes all that you've got and can take years to reach excellence.
Every time I see another way to learn how to be a programmer (now that there's money in the game, they seem to be popping up everywhere), I have two immediate reactions: 1. How cool is that. I wish I had that years ago. 2. No! We had enough bad programmers who are doing it for all the wrong reasons.
I believe the most important difference between an excellent programmer and everyone else is not intelligence, education, emotional state, or work ethic (although all of these help). The most important thing is a burning desire to build.
Someone with this burning desire won't not need to be encouraged. You won't be able to stop them. Someone without it would be better off doing something else.
We don't need more programmers. (Only IT execs who akin programmers to envelope stuffers think that.) We need more excellent programmers.
The best way to get more excellent programmers? Discourage everyone so that only the most determined can make it.
Our industry, our craft, and most of all, are code repositories would be much better off.
[+] [-] marknutter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanjaeger|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlotito|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|13 years ago|reply
Here's how I see it: Programming is a relatively young discipline. It's not really that hard, we just make it artificially difficult with bad tools, and artificially exclusive with various first world and Anglo-centric measures. We desperately need fresh perspectives. Most of what is built is rebuilt, constantly, with new bugs. As a profession, we tend to lack insight. We need more eyes, particularly fresh eyes, not 'experienced', elitist code-Rabbis.
[+] [-] YuriNiyazov|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_user|13 years ago|reply
And it goes further. People without an education or experience in software development or engineering aren't able to come up with good ideas about what to build because they aren't able to grasp the possibilities of what technology enables.
That feeling you're talking about in regards to building stuff is not something that you're born with, but rather something that grows on you by building stuff.
So no, I don't agree with you. We shouldn't force anybody to do anything of course, but the responsibility of a good educational system is to open up horizons, which means encouraging children to explore as much as possible.
[+] [-] aroberge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saturdayplace|13 years ago|reply
For a while this probably means that our code repos might be filled with nasty stuff, but I'm convinced we'll be better off for it in the long run.
[+] [-] SatvikBeri|13 years ago|reply
I am decidedly not a programmer. I don't know what an object is. I haven't learned the first bit of CS. My code would probably make you want to gouge your eyes out. And yet, it's saved/earned companies millions of dollars.
[+] [-] flaviusb|13 years ago|reply
It certainly seems possible to teach in a way that kindles a life long love of programming, rather than leaving things to blind caprice - most groups just don't even seem to realise this might be a good idea.
[+] [-] prtamil|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|13 years ago|reply
Take any mass farming. Tea collectors, for example, I believe they're paid so little they are in constant poverty. Why are they paid that way? They collect all the tea people around the world drink. Paying them the increase of the cost of a tea bag by 1 cent will make them comparatively rich. Why isn't it done? They have no bargaining power. Anyone can collect tea badly enough, this is true for most agricultural labour. It is physically hard but you can teach it in half an our. So they can always be easily replaced either with local population or with some illegal immigrants.
In the developed world, a lot of people just pass documents around and make phone calls. It's the sophistication of zooplankton and physically much less demanding than agricultural jobs, but you can't quite teach it to anyone in the world in half an hour - you need locals for this (they connect to other people and need to fit culturally) and they need some even very basic skills. So they get paid with actual money you can buy things with.
Take coders. Training a coder is not easy and it even requires some aptitude. Thus, even mediocre coders can often command their rules to their employers. And great coders are true citizens of the world, employable anywhere on their terms.
So, to make farming cool we have to make it high-tech. Another problem is that farming doesn't seem very profitable even on the large / capital scale, because the barrier to entry is so low.
[+] [-] randomdata|13 years ago|reply
For what it is worth, I make considerably more money per hour farming than I do programming, and I get paid quite well to be a programmer.
With farming, however, the barrier to entry is actually quite high. That barrier being access to capital. It is the massive debt any normal person has to take on to even think about farming that cripples most.
Programmers are quite lucky that you only need one reasonably affordable tool, which almost everyone already owns, and you are eligible to enter the market.
[+] [-] DamnYuppie|13 years ago|reply
Also your argument is based on harvesting of a product, only one aspect of farming, that is manly produced in third world countries.
[+] [-] raverbashing|13 years ago|reply
Most here don't appreciate how hard it is (especially if you're inexperienced)
Do people still grow beans using a cotton in a cup? Do they still teach that at schools? That's basically the 'hello world' of farming
Of course, depends on what you are doing, type of plants, inside a greenhouse or in an open field, the scale of it etc. Not to mention raising animals. That's very hard as well
It's unsurprising that it's getting ever more 'industry like'. You take a lot of people and specialize in only a few crops, so you can have profits that work out. Machines are expensive, fertilizer, soil analysis, etc, etc
And then there's a climate issue, too much rain, too cold, too warm and you miss the mark.
[+] [-] PeterisP|13 years ago|reply
How much population do we really need to tend all global arable land using modern methods machinery? Currently in developed countries it's somewhere near 2%, depending on the local crops used; in time it may be 1% as more and more things can now be done by machines. Countries such as India and China currently have hundreds of millions of farmers; but the same result can be produced by half or less people with farming methods currently used in USA/EU. Right now a lot of modern grain farm work consists of driving equipment around all your fields - and self-driving tractors will eliminate even that remainder "manual" work.
[+] [-] bencevans|13 years ago|reply
I'm currently an A Level student in the UK that's been hacking on software and hardware projects for the last 6-7 years. I decided to go to the June RHoK event in Southampton and worked on a new project called WaterMe with 4 others that takes open satellite imagery from NASA and outputs an index of water content and foliage and more in the area over time from a user friendly interface. Also making available the data for researchers and hackers for other awesome projects.
After the Hackathon we were accepted into a humanitarian incubator called GWOB (Geeks Without Bounds) which has put our team in contact with many spectacular personalities and guidance which has intorduced me into areas of mapping, open data, funding, advertising, additional technologies and even quad-copters/balloons/flying-machines.
We are still developing the product (now closed source) and are hoping to look for investment in the near future to run the product at scale to provide for farmers, researchers and anyone interested in things such as drought and glaciers amongst others.
Needless to say this has one of the best experiences of my life so far and is way more rewarding than any freelance work I've done as just make money jobs.
[+] [-] nnq|13 years ago|reply
...NOT!!! I know you Americans tend to see having a basic little vegetable garden as "black magic", but it's really something one can learn in under a week and based on this knowledge grow things to the point that one can actually produce enough for sale and maybe run a small business! But's you can't learn programming well enough to actually get any benefit out of it, let alone actually make a living from this alone, in a week! Yeah, I pick my food from the supermarket just like you, but I spent enough of my childhood at a farm know that things are really easy (at least if don't try running your little garden as a real business and get enough profit to cover marketing, distribution etc. - then shit gets really complicated), basically high-school biology is more than enough and everything can be found in any book or googled in minutes and you have tools that come with all the needed instructions and seed, herbicedes etc.
It all boils to this funny observation: plants can grow by themselves, you just need to guide things a bit to get the desired outcome! otoh, computers don't program themselves, code doesn't write itself - you have to do it, and this is why it's hard and also fun and rewarding (for a comparison, starting to learn how to farm by writing the genetic code of the organism's you'll be farming - ok, it's and orders of magnitude exaggeration, but it's still the closest way farming could be alike to coding).
[+] [-] logn|13 years ago|reply
My response to this quote by Steve Burgess (not the author): "Why are programmers granted such high status and wealth in our society for living in a self-created self-indulgant intellectual world of constant escapism- and yet farmers are regarded with such distain when they operate on the most important boundary between society and the biosphere?"
... would have been: I disagree with your premise. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE (God Made a Farmer) and see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGJX6t3IAlk (GoDaddy Bar Refaeli Super Bowl Commercial).
[+] [-] kriro|13 years ago|reply
"More moneyz for the farmers or everyone will starve to death."
They also tend to use somewhat stereotypical stuff depicting themselves as heroes that feed the homeland which just rubs me the wrong way.
Add the "leave this farmland empty and make more money than actually farming on it" government handout abuse (+ all sorts of economic meddling that makes very little sense) and you pretty much get the mixture of why I don't grant farmers a high status by default.
Big industry farming is also fairly disgusting. I'm not really an animal rights type of guy and more of the "whatever humans eat animals such is life" kind of school but what is happening in industry farming makes me pretty sick.
[I'm obviously aggregating over all farmers here but by and large I wouldn't start out assuming a farmer was noble]
Edit: that's obviously way off topic. My answer to the OP would be...teach kids to enjoy learning and exploring and not some specific craft. The rest will follow automatically.
Programming as a craft works well because it tends to force you to learn and explore as a side effect (same for anything scientific really)
[+] [-] walshemj|13 years ago|reply
In the EU in 20010 €43.8bn (31% of the EU budget) compared to the support that STEM industries get this is far more.
Blue states like CA and MA support the smaller interior agricultural red states - the USA is set up to favor farmers.
You don't get satire like Farmer Palmer in VIZ from nothimg
[+] [-] wfunction|13 years ago|reply
They are? I haven't seen people feel that way, so I'm kind of surprised to read this. Some references to evidence that supports this claim might be useful.
[+] [-] adamnemecek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bjorkbat|13 years ago|reply
Turns out that's a lousy way of learning the trade. They'll teach you a little bit of the hands-on stuff, but pretty soon it's all plant physiology. If you really wanted to learn, you had to go out and farm, not learn how the Krebs cycle works.
So, after having worked as a farmhand for a few other farmers, I dropped out, tried share-farming for a while. Worked well, other than the fact that the drought in Texas was breaking records, which wasn't good if you're growing vegetables, not to mention the high-temps and a lack of a greenhouse. In 6 months I was pretty much done for.
Still, I learned a lot, so much so that I figured I was probably smart enough to major in something more intellectually stimulating, so I went with engineering, found out I like programming a lot, and eventually settled in Computer Science.
Long story short, I think he's onto something, farming isn't just physically demanding, it requires thought, especially if you don't want to use nasty chemicals. I may not be the best coder in the bunch, but I've found I can figure it out a little faster than classmates who brag that they learned their first language when they were in grade school. I learned my first language, C, when I was 21.
[+] [-] mamoswined|13 years ago|reply
It's pretty hard to be a farmer coming out of ag school unless your family has a farm already for you to run since the entry costs are so high. I still produce a lot of my own food via a family farm, but god I'm glad it's not my main job. I make a mistake when coding and things can be bad, but usually they are OK especially if you have revision control and a good workflow.
I make a mistake farming and things die and I have nothing to eat or sell. Then there are just random inexplicable things that screw you over. Yes, this happens in IT, see what happened with Cloudflare this week, but imagine if that lasted for months, even years, and you could never switch providers- that's how badly weather can screw you over.
I worked in academia IT for a bit and took archaeology classes for fun. It's no surprise that ancient farmer's bones have markers like pitting that indicate periods of severe malnutrition.
[+] [-] motters|13 years ago|reply
Is it still valuable to teach kids to code, in the same way that it might have been in the 1980s? I think so, and for the same reasons why growing your own food might also be a good idea. It makes you more independent and more resilient, and reduces your dependency upon increasingly centralised systems which are vulnerable to failure or being co-opted by parties who don't care about your interests. As time goes by code makes up the fundamental infrastructure of life, so who writes and controls that code, and what their priorities are, becomes a critical question.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|13 years ago|reply
We "know" this how, exactly? Malthus was saying the same thing in 1798. Paul Ehrlich was saying the same thing in 1968.
They were both dead wrong.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
"Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles...the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979...the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics."
[+] [-] lani|13 years ago|reply
We know the specifics of the answer to this, I'd like to answer this in a general sort of way - in Alvin Toffer's 'Third wave' way of looking at the world, the integrators in a division-of-labour system are its rulers. Programmers give you tools to integrate. Remember, the key themes of the the second wave are :
"The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy."
So you see , programmers are actually bureaucracy-engineers, creating the process and flow and channels for the industries of the world to play together
[+] [-] nohuck13|13 years ago|reply
We need to remember that not all "tools" are equal. "Tools" like math, science, and philosophy provide leverage for future understanding/interacting with the world. The "tool" of farming provides the ability grow food efficiently. Important but not the same thing. The idea behind code.org and the like is that, hey, maybe programming is more foundational than it is just a trade for programmers to sit in cubicles and do all day.
If you want to argue that programming and farming belong on the same plane, you need to argue that farming provides as much leverage as coding for general life tasks, or else why this leverage doesn't matter. Implying that programming is somehow a morally corrupt activity because of its "escapism" and links to advertising and high frequency trading feels a bit inadequate to me.
[+] [-] empoman|13 years ago|reply
So again, it is not just about writing code. It is about how to approach problems and finding viable solutions, no matter what the form of the problem is. It could as well be: "How can I speed up the harvesting on my farm?". Knowing programming helps us in many more situations than just writing code.
[+] [-] cpressey|13 years ago|reply
I would call the ability to understand and solve those kinds of problems analysis, not programming. It used to be the case that "systems analyst" and "programmer" were two different job titles; at this point, they've largely merged, but I still see them as two different skill sets. (And then there's "software engineer" which is a whole other can of worms.)
[+] [-] kimburgess|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smogzer|13 years ago|reply
When i'll be a parent i'll teach them this because it's lovely, and that ! oh but this skill is amazing also ! There is bandwidth for most everything but above all your kids will copy you and see what you love and probably get inspired to follow their own path.
So teach them to do what they love and love what they do ! and teach them to feel happy above all. But teach them by being that example yourself !
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|13 years ago|reply
That sounds like a massive understatement of the actual power of electronic computers. They are the universal mental tool. The tool that can do any sufficiently specified cognitive task. There is no such physical tool yet (though we could hope for Drexlerian nanotechnology).
Programming is the way we control this tool. I do not know of any greater power.
[+] [-] dlf|13 years ago|reply
Yet, the OP's conclusion presents a stronger argument for learning to code than learning to farm: "What code.org promotes is teaching kids how to look at problems, analyse them and present them in a way that captures what they are trying to solve. It promotes teaching kids how to use a new tool that can assist them to devise solutions to whatever problems they desire. Most importantly it promotes teaching them a tool that they can use to express and communicate this."
This seems like an even stronger endorsement for learning to code than anything even in the code.org video.
I think the real underlying sentiment in this post is to not learn to code for the wrong reasons, but kids don't care about future rewards like "vats of riches, shiny things and scantily clad women." They gravitate to things that are fun and that capture their attention in the here and now. Making a sprite spin in a circle in Scratch was all it took to get my 4 year old nephew's eyes to light up. He can decide one day whether he'd rather code for altruism or profit (again, not that they are mutually exclusive).
[+] [-] sounds|13 years ago|reply
For the record, I agree that our interaction with this biosphere (and hopefully, Mars soon) vastly outweighs the significance of github. No offense intended to github, just perspective.
Part of it:
[+] [-] ihatehandles|13 years ago|reply
There isn't a god-like status, the internet and blogs are built by nerds so yes they will have their praise there, much as you will see farmers being praised in Africa where i'm from. Geeks aren't even called geeks because 1. they are far apart 2. no one even understands what we do in the first place. We all almost know each other because there's so few of us
Of course we need farmers, we need doctors, ventriloquists: we need all sorts of trades but when you find a different calling don't make yourself feel better by ridiculing other people's careers.
Or maybe, just maybe, because tech is the hype where you are and in your media you feel other trades are being neglected. Whether that's true or not for WHERE YOU LIVE i don't know. I do understand your frustration with the code.org campaign though, which makes it seem like kids won't get identity documents because they can't code (lol). But for the rest of the world outside the valley? We actually need more coders.