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Comment by kondro | Hacker News Reader

As a software engineer, I disagree. I think more people should spend more effort learning how to write software.

Every day I see people doing jobs that would be better completed by automated systems, or human-assisted automated systems. If these end-users would 'wake up' and realise that every time they do something more than once they can automate the task, they would live happier lives.

I think problem solving, researching and programming skills should form part of the core curriculum for school-aged kids. Learning to learn and research are much more valuable than being able to recall facts that will be forgotten 5 minutes in the future.

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You would be surprised how many normal adults simply cannot reliably save a file in a known place, much less retrieve it. I'm not talking about dummies either. Try teaching some community education classes some time, it will give you a enhanced appreciation fornthose who design user interfaces for things like ATMs, pointnof sale systems and such.

Kids do do better than adults, but the are learning a particular set of interface conventions, and worse they are learning it as a language, rather than as a set of abstract principles. When the paradigm changes they often have just as much trouble as their parents.

A real-life example:- a significant chunk of people I have worked with, who are working with computers every day, don't know how to open an application if the application's icon does not appear on the desktop. Seriously.

I am 23 years old and today I watched a youtube video to learn the proper way to cut up an onion. I cook a lot with onions, maybe two or three times a week, and before today I didn't know how to dice an onion except to slice it into rings and then hack at it a lot. Seriously.

Is this evidence that I am fundamentally unable to cut an onion? No. After I watched the video I went and did it. It's just that in the past I knew enough to get the job done and so learning anything more on the topic didn't have a huge priority.

I have spent hours in a class room trying to teach adults to reliably save a file in a known location and later open it. How to create folder to hold related files for a project. Some students are insulted by the simplicity of those exercises, but others _never get it_. I can walk them through the motions, draw tree diagrams till we are all sick of them. Some times I can train them to recreate a particular example, but they are still unable to generalize what is going on. And the are not dummies I'm talking about.

The question isn't whether it'd be great for people, I agree it would, but rather whether it is at all possible - I honestly think people wouldn't be able to do it beyond a simple level. It's hard to say that without sounding patronising, but I think it's unfortunately true!

However, I think there is a great deal of power available in allowing users to provide some simple level of control, i.e. via DSLs.

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