Programming: The New Literacy
Anyone who has been around me in the last few weeks has heard me preach about how great it was to learn PHP and be able to build stuff myself. In one of those preaching sessions with my friend Eric he suggested I check out this article about programming being the literacy of the 21st century. Needless to say it’s a great read and one I’ll need to do a proper writeup about at some point soon. In the meantime, here’s a nice paragraph from the piece:
“One might ask, ‘Will every educated person really have to program? Can’t the people who need programming just buy it?’ Possibly. Of course, with that model, we have in a sense returned to the Middle Ages or ancient Egypt, or even before. Then, if you needed to communicate your thoughts on paper, you couldn’t do it yourself. You had to hire a better-educated person — a scribe — who knew the writing code. Then, at the other end, you needed someone to read or decode it — unless, of course, you were ‘well educated,’ that is, you had been taught to read and write and thus had become literate. “
Hi, I'm 
This hit a nerve with me.
1. Because sadly I’m one of the people with lots of ideas but who can’t make them. It’s like being a kid with no arms in a room full of lego. I can dream about castles but the nearest I can get to building one is smashing my head against small chunks of plastic in the hope that some of them click together.
OK, I’m exaggerating, but there is a real truth there. I only JUST managed to scrabble together my recent I Feel NYC thing using iWeb. Only just. A year ago, when I had the idea, I couldn’t make it at all. I had to sit there and wait for a software update.
2. I wrote a chapter for the second Age of Conversation book recently on the new creative breed. What I wrote was rubbish. What I should have written is that the new creative breed are do-ers. And yes, they can program.
3. Douglas Rushkoff did a lecture last year called Why Johnny Can’t Program. He takes this whole thing much deeper and predictably cynically, but it’s really worth a listen. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to share this. I had access to it because I signed up to his course, but sod it, I’ve uploaded it here anyway:
WJCP
(Tried a bit of ‘coding’ there! hope it worked.)
Rushkoff argues that we’re always a step behind in terms of media. That in the 1400s we should have had a nation of writers, but instead only a few could write and we had a nation of readers. And now, we should have an age of programmers, but instead, we have a nation of writers. Thought provoking stuff.
God, I’ll shut up now. I haven’t written anything on my blog for ages and now I’m writing a novel here.
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A HA! Thanks for sharing. We wish this article had been around two years ago. We had the idea for a Web development project that we wanted to come to life. We thought a great deal about the best way to accomplish our goal (granted a lot has changed in two years), and we chose to stick to our knitting. We would focus on the business side of things and outsource the programming. Since we didn’t speak the language, a great deal was lost in translation. We had to learn the hard way that being programming illiterate can be costly. We also learned that thorough (time consuming) planning is essential. If you are going to outsource programming (lots of people will still have to) you need to spend lots of time mapping out every imaginable detail ahead of time so that you don’t have to backtrack and rebuild after the project is delivered.
Andy – I did write that the new creatives were coders for AOC2!
EEEP dude. Teach me asap. I’ll bring the beer.
When this becomes a technocracy, I wanna be a scribulous.