TITLE: Be Honest About Programming; The Stakes Are High
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 30, 2017  1:35 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
It's become commonplace of late to promote programming as fun!
and something everyone will want to learn, if only they had a
chance.  Now, I
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2017-06.html#e2017-06-29T16_03_06.htm">
   love to program</A>,
but I've also been teaching long enough to know that not everyone
takes naturally to programming.  Sometimes, they warm up to it
later in their careers, and sometimes, they never do.

<A HREF="https://qz.com/987170/coding-is-not-fun-its-technically-and-ethically-complex/">
   This Quartz article</A>
takes the conventional wisdom to task as misleading:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Insisting on the glamour and fun of coding is the wrong way
 to acquaint kids with computer science.  It insults their
 intelligence and plants the pernicious notion in their
 heads that you don't need discipline in order to progress.
 As anyone with even minimal exposure to making software
 knows, behind a minute of typing lies an hour of study.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

But the author does think that people should understand code and
what it means to program, but not because they necessarily will
program very much themselves:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 In just a few years, understanding programming will be an
 indispensable part of active citizenship.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

This is why it's important for people to learn about programming,
and why it's so important not to sell it in a way that ambushes
students when they encounter it for the first time.  Software
development is both technically and ethically challenging.  All
citizens will be better equipped to participate in the world if
they understand these challenges at some level.  Selling the
challenges short makes it harder to attract people who might be
interested in the ethical challenges and harder to retain people
turned off by technical challenges they weren't expecting.
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