When will IT people stop focusing on the activity and instead highlight the result?
(Similar text published on Languages of the Future - an initiative to bring programming into the school curriculum)
"But darling, you have programmed!"
The father tried to pat his daughter on the head, but she shied away.
"No, I just changed the settings. I didn't like the background color of the blog."
"But you've been inside the code structure! You've coded! You should go for it!"
"OH!"
It is now 30 years since programming became available to the common man with the advent of the personal computer. Since then, the importance of programming has grown enormously and is present in almost everything around us, including the plastic cup on your table (how many lines of code have been involved from the time the oil was taken out of the ground to the time the cup is standing where it is?)
Yet. Despite the immense importance of coding, we are far from a common understanding that everyone should know the basics of programming. Schoolchildren still get to rub ebonite rods and solder with a soldering iron, but they don't learn the most basic principles of sequences, iterations, objects and other things that govern our lives in detail.
Whose fault is it? Sure, we can blame technophobic, backward-looking forces in various parts of the education system. But I don't think that's the problem. What it is about is an "epic fail" of all those who work with IT to convey in an exciting way what they really do. Where the focus is always on the activity of "programming" instead of highlighting the many amazing results of programming.
You can do thought experiments on how to effectively kill interest in different professions. Let's take the office jobs many of us have as an example. A majority of time is spent reading and writing emails. Let's call each other mail handlers! "My dear son, I think you should go into email management! Look how well I earn! I also get to meet a lot of exciting people! And I never stop developing in reading and writing emails!"
Most children probably don't think "I don't want to be stuck in an office emailing all day". Office workers tend to focus on the outcome of what they do rather than the activity. But among IT people, a whole culture, or rather subcultures, has developed around the activity itself, effectively alienating those who don't want to identify with "programming" in the first place.
This explains why many teenage girls are wriggling like snakes to avoid being associated with 'programmers', even though more and more people are engaging in and discovering coding without thinking about it. It is also why large parts of the education system feel at best wary, at worst completely alienated, from the phenomenon.
We have now gathered a number of enthusiasts in the Languages of the Future initiative. The goal is that together we will start pushing the rest of the IT community (myself included) to promote programming languages for what they are: a great means, but not an end in themselves. Because just like spoken languages, they are about something else: communication, relationships and creation.