TITLE: Alive with Infinite Possibilities
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 18, 2013 2:42 PM
DESC:
-----
BODY:
Engelbart's Violin
tells the interesting story of Douglas Engelbart's chorded
keyboard, or "chorder", an input device intended as a supplement
to the traditional keyboard. Engelbart was part of a generation
that saw computing as a universe of unlimited possibilities, and
more than many others he showed us glimpses of what it could be.
I grew up in an age when an unadorned BASIC interpreter was
standard equipment on any computer, and with so little software
available to us, we all wrote programs to make the machine do
our bidding. In a narrower way, we felt the sense of unlimited
possibilities that drove Engelbart, Sutherland, and the
generations that came before us. If only we all had vision as
deep.
Unfortunately, not many teenagers get to have that kind of
experience anymore. BASIC became VB.Net, a corporate language
for a corporate world. The good news is that languages like
Python and even JavaScript make programming accessible to more
people again, but the ethos of anyone learning to program on
his or her own at home seems to have died off.
Engelbart's Violin uses strong language to judge the
current state of computing, with some of its strongest lamenting
the "cruel discrepancy" between the experience of a creative
child learning to program and the world of professional
programming:
When you are a teenager, alone with a (programmable) computer,
the universe is alive with infinite possibilities. You are a
god. Master of all you survey. Then you go to school, major
in "Computer Science", graduate -- and off to the salt mines
with you, where you will stitch silk purses out of sow's ears
in some braindead language, building on the braindead systems
created by your predecessors, for the rest of your working life.
There will be little room for serious, deep creativity. You
will be constrained by the will of your master (whether the
proverbial "pointy-haired boss", or lemming-hordes of fickle
startup customers) and by the limitations of the many
poorly-designed systems you will use once you no longer have
an unconstrained choice of task and medium.
Ouch. We who teach CS at the university find ourselves trapped
between the needs of a world that employs most of our graduates
and the beauty that computing offers. Alas, what Alan Kay said
about Engelbart applies more broadly: "Engelbart, for better
or for worse, was trying to make a violin.... [M]ost people
don't want to learn the violin." I'm heartened to see so many
people, including my own colleagues, working so hard to bring
the ethos and joy of programming back to children, using
Scratch, media computation, and web programming.
This week, I began a journey with thirty or so undergraduate CS
students, who over the next four months will learn Scheme and
-- I hope -- get a glimpse of the infinite possibilities that
extend beyond their first jobs, or even their last. At the
very least, I hope I don't shut any more doors on them.
~~~~
PHOTO. The PARC 5-key Chord Keyboard, from
the Buxton collection
at Microsoft Research.
-----
