Ask HN: What 'programming' skills should an average person ideally have? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What 'programming' skills should an average person ideally have?

3 pointsjmduke7 comments

Note that my definition of 'programming' is broad enough to include, say, VBA in Excel, and my definition of an average person is 'someone who is not pursuing a career in programming.'

My initial guess is VBA, enough SQL to sufficiently query a mature database, and enough Python/Ruby to be able to automate simple tasks. What are your thoughts?

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It's a popular fantasy here that 'we' are what everyone should be but it's nothing more than that. The average person should be concerned with their diet, health and financial situations not what we do.

Enough to put electrical tape over a blinking VCR/DVD display and pop popcorn in the microwave without burning more than half the kernels... :-)

Honestly, I would say enough to write a simple joined SQL query, do some conditionals on a spreadsheet and/or mailmerge.

Most folk will never use more than that knowledge. There are many many people including kids that rarely touch a computer. Hard to believe but it's true, talked with some teenagers last year bout computers, many said "yeah, I don't like em, I only use them when I have to do schoolwork on em."

I don't think that an average person should have any programming skills.

Just like I don't think that the average car owner would require engineering skills, or an average eater would require farming skills.

Just like I don't think that the average car owner would require engineering skills, or an average eater would require farming skills.

I'm talking things on the scale of fixing a carburator or cooking a home-cooked meal.

Scripting should be considered a basic form of digital literacy along with learning enough Photoshop to know what can be faked and understanding why Wikipedia can only be trusted so far.

The particular scripting language doesn't matter that much but I'd say JavaScript is the most ubiquitous and accessible. The main concepts people need to learn are: 1) Decomposing a problem into steps and conditions. 2) iterating through and transforming text and numbers and 3) responding to user events.

All of these concepts are useful to "average" people wanting to take control of their data or understand how their applications work.

I think everybody should be able to write some small scripts to his/her environment. For example, someone who uses excel often should know enough VBA to automate some tasks. On the other hand, someone who has no exposure to computer at all (which is closer to my definition of a normal person, as tablets and smartphones are overtaking PCs) doesn't need to know anything at all.

I still find it surprising that some people - who use a computer often - don't know keyboard shortcuts, e.g. for copy/paste. So forget the average person having programming skills.

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