Programming Is Not a Skill

ethang.dev

6 pointseglove2 comments

If "programming" is not a skill (too broad?), then "design" and "debugging" are skills that can be be applied to all sorts of activities other than programming. Not sure if they can be taught, but they certainly can be learned via practice. Another example where 10K days/repetitions are required to build up the necessary muscles.

I think programming was a proxy for understanding, that is, only by understanding a system well could you produce a good program. The actual act of programming is arguably like speaking. I wouldn’t call speaking a skill, but oration is, as is speech writing.

Assessing programming in a uni environment was effective because it was a proxy for understanding and implicitly tested things like design and debugging capability. Perhaps teaching programming required so much repetition because we are not so equipped to teach the actual skills. AI accelerates the pedagogical concern because it can generate programs without the user understanding, so assessing programming no longer by proxy assesses actual skills like design and debugging.

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