Geeky is sexy, hacking is hot and the veneration of the technologist has reached its logical conclusion in 2014. On either side of the Atlantic, people are in a big hurry to learn coding. Not to join the Big Data gold rush that is eternally in the offing, but simply to bring basic programming skills on board their professional profiles.
In the US, coding boot camps featuring huge fees and scrunched-up teaching schedules have become popular. England and Wales will introduce coding as a compulsory subject in schools in September, and a public-private project named Year of Code is trying to get people used to the idea that in the very near future, code will be central to professional life. That is to say, Python will be as commonly spoken as Dutch. This is scary for people who think Python is slithery double Dutch, and infuriating for professional coders who protest that proficiency in a computer language barely scratches the surface of computer science, so Year of Code got off to a rocky start.
The PR disaster was that the project was headed by Tory activist and PR specialist Lottie Dexter, who knows no computer languages and, on Jeremy Paxman?s Newsnight, did not appear to even understand how they work. With her insistence that coding will be central to making a living, she was put down for a neoliberal trying to raise armies of code-aware school-going droids for Google to employ later.
But actually?and acknowledging the obvious technical incompetence of the director of Year of Code?both sides of the argument were a bit off. Paxman suggested that the premise that coding is essential was a fallacy: you don?t need to know how to code, just as you don?t need to know how a light bulb works in order for your home to be tastefully illuminated. A better analogy would have been literacy, which was no more necessary just a few hundred years ago than knowledge of coding is today. In medieval Europe, this was true even in seats of learning like Padua and Paris. The term ?lecture?, so integral to teaching, literally means a reading, from the Latin lectus??that which has been read?. Teachers had to read out loud (from a lectern!) because some of their students might be illiterate, knowing only the alphabet, needed for copying texts in pre-Gutenberg Europe. On the other hand, just like knowing the alphabets does not a poet make, the ability to type printf(?Hello world!?); the first program you learn in any language (it just prints ?Hello world!? on a blank screen), does not a programmer make either.
The number of services online which teach coding, such as Code Academy and Khan Academy, are proliferating, and the world in general and the industry in particular will begin to feel the impact of self-taught programmers in a few years. However, online services do not cause alarm because they teach at the learner?s pace. It is services which compress courses by excluding theory and methodology which are causing concern. US code dojos churn out fresh graduates every few weeks. Year of Code claimed that a schoolteacher could be taught to teach programming in a day. That is scarcely possible, unless they?re thinking of flashing the teacher?s brain with a ROM image. The resulting headache for the UK would be epic.
However, Paxman could turn out to be right in the long term. You may not need to learn to code line by line because eventually, you should be able to tell the machine what you want, and it should be able to deliver. The difficulty of the project lies in generating machine awareness. Machines do not natively understand the simplest human communications, such as, ?take a right turn after 100 yards?. A program and the environment in which it runs need to know which way right is, and what a yard is. The biggest challenge of computing is the creation of tools and architectures which can take the drudgery out of coding and make it accessible to lay persons, and turn them into autodidacts. Something like using scripts and blocks of code like Lego bricks in a plug and play environment.
The formal programmer would dismiss both Legoland solutions and American-style boot camps as crippleware incapable of developing large, complex programs because they impart no knowledge of or ability to manage the underlying hardware, especially memory. They only teach how to rapidly achieve common deliverables of programming. But the market is the final arbiter, and demand is growing faster than supply. There is a sudden explosion of computing platforms, from servers to handhelds to phones to intelligent cars and the talkative Internet of Things, but the supply of trained programmers isn?t keeping up. The scope for autodidacts and irregular programmers is expanding, and this will have disruptive consequence for the industry.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com