TITLE: Programming as Literacy
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 24, 2005  3:13 PM
DESC: Repeat after me: everyone should learn to program as a new medium of communication.  Now, how do we make that happen?
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BODY:
Every once in a while I am jolted from my own
parochial concerns by a reminder that we in
computing have an opportunity to do so much more
than just train tomorrow's Java or C++ programmers.
On Friday, Darren Hobbs reminded me with his blog
<A HREF="http://www.darrenhobbs.com/archives/000651.html">
   Programming as Literacy</A>.
Darren begins:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
<EM>In what's typically called 'the western world',
before literacy became essentially ubiquitous it
was limited to a select few.  Monks originally,
then scribes.  These individuals possessed a truly
remarkable skill.  They could make marks on paper
that could remember things.  They could capture
information and retrieve it later.  Associated with
this skill was the ability to make marks that could
perform complex computations and produce an answer.
People with these skills were hired by nobles and
merchants to increase business value.</EM>
</BLOCKQUOTE>

<IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/misc/ward-cunningham.jpg"
     WIDTH="150"
     ALIGN="right">

I have mentioned
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-11.html#e2004-11-03T15_47_52.htm">
   this idea before</A>,
looking to computer scientists such as Alan Kay
and Ward Cunningham, for whom computing is more
than just a technical skill reserved to a special
few.  Ward's wiki enables a new kind of conversation.
In Kay's vision, computing is

<BLOCKQUOTE>
<EM>a new kind of reading and writing medium that
allows some of the most important powerful ideas
to be discussed and played with and learned</EM>
</BLOCKQUOTE>

in ways more profound than any book.  (See his
essay
<A HREF="http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/how_child_learn.html">
   Background on How Children Learn</A>
for more.)

<IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/alan-kay-at-oopsla/alan-kay.gif"
     WIDTH="150"
     ALIGN="left">

Alan often speaks passionately that we hold in our
hands the most powerful tool for changing the world
since the printing press five hundred years ago.  I
do not think that the passion in his words in out of
place.  Like Alan, I believe that we are creating the
medium that people will use to create the next Renaissance.

When we think about computing and computing education
in such terms, the problems we encounter teaching
CS majors to program seem small.  But these problems
also point out just how much work we have to do if
we want to effect the sort of change that our opportunity
affords.  I suspect that the sort of things we need
to do to make programming a new form of general
literacy available to all would only make teaching
CS majors easier.

Others are thinking about this problem, too.
Darren Hobbs' blog was a nice reminder of that.
And John Mitchell responds to my blog on
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-04.html#e2005-04-14T18_00_35.htm">
   accountability through conversation</A>
by suggesting that
<A HREF="http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=106031">
   our programming languages should be more conversational</A>.
I think that natural language will always have an
advantage over programming language in this regard,
but John's idea that we can create little languages
that are structured, predictable, comprehensible,
and concise enough to support more natural interaction
is worth thought.  The work of Alan Kay's group on
eToys and Active Essays, described at
<A HREF="http://www.squeakland.org/">
   Squeakland</A>,
is certainly aimed in this direction.

I am glad summer is almost here.  I need some time
to back away from day-to-day classroom issues to think
about loftier goals, and concrete plans to move toward
them.
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