I've got a classical education in computer science, an engineering degree, and plus/minus about a decade in my coding skill being a major contributing factor in my ability to eat on a daily basis.
On the one hand, I concur with you, in that ability to produce a working system ex nihlio is both a) much, much harder than anyone suggesting the general populance Just Learn To Code expects and b) of limited utility to many people. To pick an example at random from the front page, there is virtually no problem with being severely poor in NYC that would get alleviated with any of the participants Just Learning To Code, unless that in the process transformed one of the involved adults into a responsible member of society. (There being many, many people in the story who could use that in addition to the obvious choices.)
Learning to code might assist people into having a better mental model of computers and a lot of computer-like systems which they interact with on a daily basis.
For example, you're a lawyer, and you have practical experience with how law and bureacracy works on a nuts and bolts level. I assume you've occasionally met people who believe that law/bureacracy operate in an entirely random and capricious fashion which cannot be influenced by their own behavior. Dealing with people who think that is a little trying, right? Both because it is wrong and because, more to the point, it causes them to take self-destructive courses of action. (To see many examples of this, see again the article on being extremely poor in NYC, where consequences are predictable based on past behavior seems to be as foreign as trying to explain thunderbolts as something-other-than-the-wrath-of-an-angry-god to ancient Greeks.)
If people had a mental model of how computers (and similar systems worked), it would improve their -- for lack of a better word -- digital citizenship. Paypal probably didn't freeze your account on a whim any more than the probation officer has decided to "violate" you based on personal animus. There was probably a heuristic triggered by behavior. More importantly, a) that behavior can be avoided in the future, b) that heuristic can probably be overridden by appeal to the relevant authorities, and c) that heuristic was probably instituted due to it achieving goals most of the time rather than as an instrument of oppression.
We could look back to a time in the not-too-distant past and say that, for the average citizen, knowing the nuts and bolts operation of the law was probably unnecessary: they didn't have touchpoints with the State that frequently and when they did the operation was well-understood by all parties. You don't have to understand the inner operations of magisterial courts all that well if you can appreciate that killing people is generally a bad idea. Recent years, however, have gotten the State into substantially more lines of business than just regulating who gets to kill who when. The average citizen can now expect to run into laws and their consequences quite frequently. At your job. At your doctor's. At your school. At your bank. When the government sends you a check. When you send the government a check. The average citizen is now expected to be able to make consequential decisions based on the law. There are many possible decisions which are wrong ones.
Similarly, in the not-too-distant past, you could have been totally ignorant about how computers operated. Computers were, after all, mostly maintained by other people and they didn't come into contact with your life that frequently. When they did, they were pretty easy to anticipate the function of even if you had no clue what Deep Magicks were invoked to cause it. The computer keeps a record of your bank balance, which it does via addition and subtraction, so you'd best assure addition and subtraction sums to greater than zero. As long as you do you'll have no problems with computers.
This is not the world we live in in 2013, and I would not bet that computers and similar systems become less relevant over time, any more than I'd bet that law suddenly decide to recede from its historically novel importance to people.
Computers operate consistently. Their rules are written in advance. It is easy to make mistakes in writing those rules. The symptoms of those mistakes will (generally) be predictable and consistent. Since computers operate according to rules, given the rules, we can make certain confident predictions about their behavior in advance of seeing it. Since computers operate according to rules, we can learn the rules they operate under by observation, and therefore make confident predictions about their future behavior by observation.
Everything I just said is something that you'll know in your bones by the time you've made your first substantial program, and yet they're Deep Magick to most people. Seriously. I think I could poll a family gathering of the McKenzies, whose average educational attainment is a master's, and probably get less than 20% of the family to agree that "Computers operate according to rules." My family, like most users, assumes that the devil box just does whatever it feels like and this is so frustrating when it stops them from getting their grant applications in on time.
Everything you mention can be done by a non-programmer.
- Copy and paste your list of charities into MS Word and print it
- Not sure what that is about
- Create a blog on one of the many readily available platforms like Wordpress or blogger. Plenty of non-coders already doing this
- Getting a grasp on technology has nothing to do with coding
What if your list is 10,000 and they are links on a paginated search results page? Cut and paste does not work here -scrapping sure will. Now think about what happens if the page is supported by dynamic tools like AJAX ?
How often does this actually need to be done? I know beginner coders who struggle with this, esp when it comes to AJAX. I very much doubt that someone with no interest in coding who is forced to code because of some government initiative for one semester is going to fare any better at that task.
The point is, unless you have some self interest in the subject then there is no point in forcing you to learn it, it is going to be of no benefit to you in your future life.
At work, I had a spreadsheet. Technical people, coders even, had a hard time finding the solution: convert to CSV, cut -f, awk print, in order to tack a hostname onto a column with relative HTTP paths. (No error checking required.)
If you were using Excel, you code have just written a VBA macro to do it, or created another column with formula =CONCATENATE("http://domain/",A1) if that's what you mean
On the one hand, I concur with you, in that ability to produce a working system ex nihlio is both a) much, much harder than anyone suggesting the general populance Just Learn To Code expects and b) of limited utility to many people. To pick an example at random from the front page, there is virtually no problem with being severely poor in NYC that would get alleviated with any of the participants Just Learning To Code, unless that in the process transformed one of the involved adults into a responsible member of society. (There being many, many people in the story who could use that in addition to the obvious choices.)
Learning to code might assist people into having a better mental model of computers and a lot of computer-like systems which they interact with on a daily basis.
For example, you're a lawyer, and you have practical experience with how law and bureacracy works on a nuts and bolts level. I assume you've occasionally met people who believe that law/bureacracy operate in an entirely random and capricious fashion which cannot be influenced by their own behavior. Dealing with people who think that is a little trying, right? Both because it is wrong and because, more to the point, it causes them to take self-destructive courses of action. (To see many examples of this, see again the article on being extremely poor in NYC, where consequences are predictable based on past behavior seems to be as foreign as trying to explain thunderbolts as something-other-than-the-wrath-of-an-angry-god to ancient Greeks.)
If people had a mental model of how computers (and similar systems worked), it would improve their -- for lack of a better word -- digital citizenship. Paypal probably didn't freeze your account on a whim any more than the probation officer has decided to "violate" you based on personal animus. There was probably a heuristic triggered by behavior. More importantly, a) that behavior can be avoided in the future, b) that heuristic can probably be overridden by appeal to the relevant authorities, and c) that heuristic was probably instituted due to it achieving goals most of the time rather than as an instrument of oppression.
We could look back to a time in the not-too-distant past and say that, for the average citizen, knowing the nuts and bolts operation of the law was probably unnecessary: they didn't have touchpoints with the State that frequently and when they did the operation was well-understood by all parties. You don't have to understand the inner operations of magisterial courts all that well if you can appreciate that killing people is generally a bad idea. Recent years, however, have gotten the State into substantially more lines of business than just regulating who gets to kill who when. The average citizen can now expect to run into laws and their consequences quite frequently. At your job. At your doctor's. At your school. At your bank. When the government sends you a check. When you send the government a check. The average citizen is now expected to be able to make consequential decisions based on the law. There are many possible decisions which are wrong ones.
Similarly, in the not-too-distant past, you could have been totally ignorant about how computers operated. Computers were, after all, mostly maintained by other people and they didn't come into contact with your life that frequently. When they did, they were pretty easy to anticipate the function of even if you had no clue what Deep Magicks were invoked to cause it. The computer keeps a record of your bank balance, which it does via addition and subtraction, so you'd best assure addition and subtraction sums to greater than zero. As long as you do you'll have no problems with computers.
This is not the world we live in in 2013, and I would not bet that computers and similar systems become less relevant over time, any more than I'd bet that law suddenly decide to recede from its historically novel importance to people.
Computers operate consistently. Their rules are written in advance. It is easy to make mistakes in writing those rules. The symptoms of those mistakes will (generally) be predictable and consistent. Since computers operate according to rules, given the rules, we can make certain confident predictions about their behavior in advance of seeing it. Since computers operate according to rules, we can learn the rules they operate under by observation, and therefore make confident predictions about their future behavior by observation.
Everything I just said is something that you'll know in your bones by the time you've made your first substantial program, and yet they're Deep Magick to most people. Seriously. I think I could poll a family gathering of the McKenzies, whose average educational attainment is a master's, and probably get less than 20% of the family to agree that "Computers operate according to rules." My family, like most users, assumes that the devil box just does whatever it feels like and this is so frustrating when it stops them from getting their grant applications in on time.