On 03/16/2014 03:40 PM, Dave Long wrote: > http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/000849.html >> I still meet a lot of people who think that knowing how to program is >> about knowing programming languages or the APIs of libraries or >> "frameworks", and who are much more impressed with the quality of the >> gradients an a program's UI than with its underlying functionality. >> ... Once, I thought that I had believed these things myself >> because I was 6-12 years old, but apparently many adults have these >> cognitive limitations too. > > Scott McCloud mentioned the same thing in a different domain in > "Understanding Comics": > http://gangles.ca/images/SixLayers2.jpg > > and I've also seen it in sport, so it's likely to be common to any > discipline: it's much easier for neophytes to see surface qualities, > while appreciation of underlying qualities comes slowly with experience. > > -Dave > I feel like this, more than anything else, speaks to the importance of teaching programming. I'm dubious that it will be generally useful, and think that the era when a surface understanding of software marks one out for special treatment as a job candidate is fading fast. But knowing some programming, like knowing some music or knowing some art, aids in aesthetic appreciation, and helps one avoid getting scammed by bad work.
It's an attitude towards software that seems to be little in the public discourse, and the reason for that, I suspect, is self-referential; understanding that the art of an art you don't understand is like the art of some art that perhaps you do understand (but let's face it, you probably don't) is harder than just assuming that it's magic you'll understand if you learn to say Shibboleth. On the other hand, sad as this makes me, I suspect it's largely a self-correcting phenomena, at least for spotting the base case of egregiously bad work. -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-discuss
