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Comment by jusben1369 | Hacker News Reader

Let me ask, earnestly, why is learning to code better or more important than:

- Studying medicine at school so you can avoid engaging with the expensive medical system for all but the most critical issues? - Studying law so that you understand how to read contracts and understand legislation?

Mathematics and language are the building blocks of programming. We study those. Going further upstream into the outputs of those disciplines (medicine, law, computer science) to pick compulsory topics doesn't strike me as making much sense.

Also, how do we reconcile this with the emphasis on design whereby the concept of the underlying nuts and bolts should be abstracted away from the end user? (two very separate questions I know)

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I would figure a lot of what you pay a lawyer for is not making sure you understand the contract but a) to save time and b) to have someone who's in the profession and knows the legal quirks, loopholes, and procedures.

I would figure a lot of what you pay a doctor for is not to mend every problem you have with your body to but to ensure that it's done timely, safely, and with the least amount of risk/damage/scarring/whatever as possible. Yeah you could probably do your own surgery but why?

Learning to code is hardly as serious an undertaking and yet it teaches you how to think about solving a problem, estimating time to solve that problem, and reducing the amount of time needed to create the solution to that problem. It teaches general problem-solving skills and at the very least can lead to recreational uses (building small games or family web sites).

I think problem-solving is probably one of the most important skills one needs in his toolbox to succeed in life and so why wouldn't it be taught as early as children can comprehend it?

Hey Volscio thanks for that. I agree that problem solving is great skill to have. Philosophy long filled that role but has fallen a little out of favor. I studied it (minor) at University and many of the lecturers pointed out (mostly in a hope to keep us engaged and motivated) that some of the world's best philosophers make a small fortune on the side with paid engagements for large corporations. Corporations literally give them problems that they cannot solve in terms of the market and philosophers solve them. While somewhat skeptical at first I was ultimately very impressed with how philosophy taught a disciplined approach to problem solving

I think problem-solving is probably one of the most important skills one needs in his toolbox to succeed in life

This is the key statement. But I don't think it needs to be taught through programming, people were problem solving way before the invention of computers, or even electricity. I know this is HN so we have a biased view on this, but the ability to think/problem solve and programming do not go hand-in-hand.

I certainly agree that everyone should have exposure to programming, and the opportunity to pursue this further if they so wish, but to thrust it upon everyone is not the answer - not everyone will end up in a job where IT is the main focus.

You know how Physics is sometimes viewed as a kind of ad-hoc applied Mathematics? For that reason, we often/usually consider maths the more fundamental discipline.

Mathematicians are generally doing ad-hoc applied computer programming in order to carry on mathematics at this point. Give the academy another 50-100 years to figure out what this means, if anything, about the fundamentals of each discipline.

I think we'll conclude that advances in the rest of mathematics are all built on computable mathematics now, including proof, making computation foundational until/unless someone finds a more powerful approach.

PS: There are no doubt mathematicians reading this, and the ad-hoc part may make you bristle. If you can point me to a paper that begins with a proof of correctness, of both the hardware and operating system which ran whatever code was involved, I'll take it back.

That's an interesting perspective I hadn't thought about. I've also always seen programming as a good way to actually learn math. Topics beyond basic algebra (e.g. calc, linear alg, stats, and even geometry) seem to lend themselves pretty well to programmatic implementation. Just imagine having to implement visual representations of Euclid's elements or Integration as Processing[1] apps. Sure you'd necessarily have to learn the concepts in order to implement them, but more importantly, you'd get to avoid all that cryptically terse math notation in favor of more sensible programming conventions :)

[1] http://processing.org/

Basic medicine (how the body operates) and basic law (how the government operates) is usually taught in elementary school.

Basic computer understanding is not, or at least is being taught extremely poorly. Children don't need to learn the intricacies of Word. What they should be taught is how to code (so they understand basics of computers/filesystems/text editors) & use Google (so they know how to find more information) - everything else they can teach themselves.

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