The concept of “Coding Literacy”
The message from educators, the tech community, and even politicians is clear: everyone should learn to code. […] Computer programming becomes part of an array of communication skills important in everyday life, and literacy, augmented by programming, becomes more capacious.
These words are taken from the summary of a book by Annette Vee, called “Coding Literacy”.
But What is Coding Literacy?
Coding, or more broadly the act of programming a computer, is becoming increasingly more important every year, with millions of people learning some sort of programming language every day. This situation opens up the possibility of a parallelism between the historical moment in which most people didn’t know how to read and write.
Here are a few of my favorite points of view on this topic:
Andrew Ng (during AI Podcast by Lex Fridman):
Once upon a time, only a small part of humanity was literate (could read and write). This was acceptable becasue they felt like reading wasn’t necessary. Maybe they just relied on a few “best-sellers” to write books, so nobody else needed to know how to write. But what we found out by having universal basic literacy, is that it dramatically enhances human-to-human communications, and we can now write for an audience of one (like with instant messaging or email). I think that in computing we’re still in that phase where so few people know how to code that the coders have to code for very large audiences. But if most people knew basic programming, it would completely change human-to-computer communication skills. (This is in particular relevant to Data Science rather than software engineering).
Douglas Rushkoff of CodeAcademy:
When we acquired language, points out Rushkoff, we didn’t just learn how to listen, but also how to speak. When we acquired text, we didn’t just learn how to read, but also how to write. Now that we have computers, we are learning to use them but not how to program them. When we are not code literate, we must accept the devices and software we use with whatever limitations and agendas their creators have built into them.
Even without choosing to become a professional or being a full time software developer, understanding how something that affects (almost) everything around us nowadays is really important so we do not become subordinate of technology. What code literacy also teaches us, isn’t just a new ‘language’. Coding teaches us to think in different ways, to identify, break down and solve problems, to re-use things that others have made and integrate them to your own creation process. Coding teaches skills that are beyond programming, skills for problem solving, skills for design, modeling.
Christopher McFadden, author at InterestingEngineering:
Coding and coding literacy can be argued to be one of the most important skills for current and future generations to learn. Many have argued that it should form part of a national curriculum on par with a native language, the sciences, and math.
We are surrounded with electronic devices each running uncountable numbers of software that run on code of some kind. Our modern world is also heavily reliant on the internet with workforces being required to be more and more computer literate with each passing year. It is, therefore, as important to making a living in the modern world as having a good grasp of grammar, spelling, and numeracy.
But as software becomes ever more sophisticated, the general public is being further and further detached from how they actually work. While they are exhaustively designed and tested to be as intuitive to use as possible, how they work is fast becoming something of a kind of magic for all but a select few.
While this might not bother you on the surface, it could have serious implications in the future. Most users are simply trusting the developers that they have only the best intentions when they use their products. For this reason, many educators are now pushing for making at least basic coding literacy a requirement for all students.
I hope you liked this quick article. If you did, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and a like, and share it with your friends.
P.S: You can also view this article (and more) on my blog!
