Communications of the ACM
Dear Everyone Teaching Programming: You're Doing It Wrong
Credit: Technology Review
Do-it-yourself programming sites are mostly useless because of their opaque interfaces and because programming itself is broken, according to Bret Victor, a former interface designer for Apple.
The main problem with programming is "the programmer has to imagine the execution of the program and never sees the data," Victor says. He compares learning to write code to teaching people how to cook, and says an experienced chef would not try to create new dishes by perfectly simulating everything between the ingredients and the dish in her head, and the chef would not expect everything from the food preparation to the cooking process to be concealed from her.
Victor offers solutions, from redesigning integrated development environments so that they visualize the flow of data from one instruction to the next, to rethinking the basic metaphors that undergird programming languages themselves. Current approaches to teaching coding will generate enough programmers for those who subscribe to the programmers as plumbers analogy, which Victor does not. "The ability to create your own software for your own uses is very powerful," he says.
From Technology Review
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