Currently the Canadian workforce isn't responding quickly enough to a post-manufacturing economy, and it has put the entire economy at risk. One particular sector where the "skills mismatch" is dire is in information technology (cloud computing etc.), and that shortage is becoming an increasingly dire economic issue for Canadians. Clearly the answer is education. Perhaps high school kids should be told the facts: that an IT degree is significantly more valuable than a standard arts degree, both from an economic and personal perspective. This problem could get serious over the next five years if action isn't taken.
There is no excuse for not teaching kids how to program in elementary school. There are really basic languages they could be learning. And kids have the perfect mind to learn it! It's like a combination of learning a new language and learning how to build things with legos. And kids have the perfect brains to do both really easily. Especially if you sell it right. Tell them this is how you make video games and show them how to make their own video games and they will learn very quickly. Also in my opinion, mine-craft should be in every elementary computer lab. You can learn a lot of things about circuit engineering through minecraft.
By education I hope you don't mean school. My "schooling" was the biggest waste of time and money (comparatively speaking). Companies don't care that you can write an essay or regurgitate facts and figures, they want to know that you'll hit the ground running and be familiar with their tools. Just speaking from my own college experience, computer courses are far too conceptual and don't really give you an accurate view of the private sector. Noting an application you personally created or a website you design and maintain is far more impressive than 4-6 years taking notes and tests.
The problem here is that there are a great many areas in "IT". Myself, I have worked in IT off and on since 1981. And my mom worked in it from 1969 until 1989. You have many different areas, programming, hardware, networking, and now the Internet. "Cloud Computing" is simply the newest buzz-word that is now being thrown about, and it is nothing new or special. It is just a new term for something we have done for decades, using networks or the Internet to move data from one computer to another. I think the biggest problem is normally in companies and what they want in people they hire. More and more often I am seeing companies demand a huge number of certifications, often times ones that are either unneeded (like a request for a Programmer with A+), or other almost silly requirements (BS in IT, MCSE, CCNA and 3 programming languages). This is a trend I have seen for years now, and it is just getting worse. It is not that the people with skills do not exist, they are simply being unrealistic in their requirements, either at the company itself, or through it's HR department (many times those demands are tacked on by HR, not the actual hiring section). I just about want to scream when I see a job posting that wants a Break-Fix or Trouble Desk staff (generally the people that actually fix the computers), with a requirement for a BS and MCSE. Or a posting for people to handle a roll-out (essentially upgrading all the computers in a company) with the same kind of requirement. That is just insane. People that fix the hardware generally need to know little about the network itself, their job is fixing the computers on the desktop. At most, an MCSA (Administrator certification) or MCP in the OS used (or 1-2 generations prior) is all that is really needed. After all, I do not need to know how to create a subnet mask and supernet just to connect a workstation onto a network. Myself, I find it rather frustrating when I apply for a position, only to have somebody demand my "A+ certification". For those that do not know, A+ is designed to show that the applicant has the equivelent of 3 months hands-on experience. It was originally created to help beginning technicians to get into the work place. Now, it is almost mandatory. And having worked steadily from 1988-2007 at companies like Hughes, Boeing, Disney, Chevron, and others, I find it rather frustrating that they want to see something so basic. It is like talking to an ASE Certified Master Mechanic, and demanding to see their Tune-up Certification. And since my certifications are in systems that are long dead (Novell 3 and 4, MCSE NT4), it is pretty obvious that I have been doing this for a while. And the certification requirements are only increasing. Right now, to get most of the requirement exams would cost around $2,500. And most of those are only good for a set amount of time. Either the item certified for becomes obsolete (Server 2003, XP, Vista) and newer versions must be taken (Windows 7, Server 2007, Server 2012), or they must be retaken to show you still know the basics (A+ is good for around 2 years). To me, this is just asinine. And having been in the industry for many years, I can honestly say that this problem is normally not as much on the employee side, as the employer side. They do not want to hire a programmer, a network specialist and a repair techincian. They want to hire one person to do all of these jobs, and pay him or her for only one of them.
They do, and they do not. The biggest problem I have seen over and over is HR Departments. A great many times, they take the request from a department head (hire me 3 new hardware technicians) and then add in things because they think they should be in there. And over and over, one of the most common demands is for a BA or BS, or some kind of certification (CNE and MCSE) where either none is needed for the job, or a lesser certification is all that is required. Years ago I tried to apply through the HR department for an opening at a major Aerospace company. I fit all of the qualifications, except for the degree. I submitted my resume, and said that I was substituting experience in lieu of a degree (at that time over 10 years, 2 of it at this same company). I was turned down, because I lacked a degree. A month later, I was contacted by one of my recruiters, saying there was an opening for a lead hardware tech. I applied, and got the job. Then later I was talking with my manager, and he told me that they had tried to fill that position for 3 months before going to a contractor. The next day I brought him the job announcement, and the letter I got back saying I was not qualified. He never requested the BS requirement, saying it was not needed for the position. I worked there for almost a year until the company was bought out and a large layoff happened.
The tools change frequently. If colleges taught you how to use the tools and that's it you'd be obsolete in a few years. They teach you conceptual so that no matter where technology goes you'll be able to understand it from it's core. This is why an employer is more likely to hire someone with a BS in Computer Science vs someone who taught themselves how to program Java. You definitely won't get a job at Google if all you know are the tools.
But not everybody has the kind of brain wiring that can make them a programmer. My mom was a great programmer, C, COBOL, PASCAL, FORTRAN, ADA, and others. She worked for several major corporations, becoming a Senior Systems Analyst, with only a High School diploma. I remember watching her pour through reams of paper checking code, and she had no problems doing it. Myself, I did it for only a few years. This was in the early 1980's, when COBOL was still the standard. I realized that while I could write code, I was not efficient at it, and my results were more kludges then real efficient code. When I got into computers again almost a decade later, the entire industry had changed, and I gravitated towards hardware and networking. However, in those early days, my programming background came in handy, since a lot of programs still required Batch Files (the DOS scripting language). And I was able to make these files and other scripts often do tricks that others could not even imagine. But today, Batch Files like AUTOEXEC.BAT are as obsolete as CONFIG.SYS. But I worked with a lot of really good techs that could only do the basics. But a lot of people just can't do programming. I have seen this first hand many times. Even "simple" languages like Batch, LOGO, BASIC and COBOL are just beyond the capability of a great many people. A few months ago I wrote a few simple Batch and BASIC programs, and none of the group I hang out with could make heads or tails of what I had done (and we are all IT students at ITT). I honestly think a lot of it has to do with brain wiring. I have seen people who can look at a schematic and figure out what it does by sight. I can wade through code and do the same thing. But I look at a schematic, and it is Greek to me. Yea, I can do plebian tasks like soldering and desoldering, and use a multimeter to find a defective resister or transistor and replace it. But explain how it works the way it does when all tied together, nope. And it is like many other things. Replace "Programming" with "Music" or "Art", and you might get more of an idea. We teach Music in every school, yet very few students ever become musicians. Even many that take professional lessons for years are only very basically capable musically. Because unless the person has the tallent in the first place to take advantage of the instruction, they will never really become proficiant at it. And Programming is no different. We all learned to write in school, but how many think they can actually write a book? Well, it should not be hard, most of us have had 12+ years of instruction in writing, so why can't everybody write a book? Because it is more then putting words on a page, much much more. Decades ago a lot of schools did include programming courses (those who went to school in the 1980's might remember Apple LOGO, TI LOGO, also often called "Turtle BASIC". A lot of schools spent lots of money bringing in computers, with the idea that this would teach future generations how to be programmers. But how well did that turn out? 5 years later most of them would hire people like me to set up and configure their computers. And by the early 1990's when networks and BBS were starting to be more common, I did a lot of side jobs configuring Batch files and getting Lantastic then later Win95 home networks talking to each other. But for many years, this technology changed constantly. LANtastic, then Web (the peer-to-peer NOS), then Novell Dos, only to see this all become obsolete with Windows 95. Coax giving way to 10 then 100 mb Ethernet, and now WiFi. I recently did a paper on the history of home networking, and was amazed at how little information of those days is even available anymore. It literally took me days of various searches to find information on my own favorite, unfortunately lost in most searches because it was called "Web". http://books.google.com/books?id=dR...Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=webcorp web 3.0&f=false The issue here is more that you have to keep current in this industry. IPX/SPX and NetBIOS and NetBUI have given way to TCP/IP 4 (I have been told TCP/IP 6 will be the standard, someday). ThickNet and ThinNet have now given way for UTP, Cat 3, Cat 5, Cat 6, and now Fibre. The idea of teaching programming in school might work, if the kids continued to do it afterwards. A skill learned when you are 10 then not used again might as well have never been learned at all.
The point isn't to make everyone programmers. Just like the point of teaching kids to write is to make everyone write a book. The point is to give kids a basic understanding for computer code and circuitry. It would put them a step up in this world.
Not really. As I previously showed, basic programming techniques were common in the 1980's. However, they were dropped when it became obvious that this would in no way help prepare the kids for future jobs or experiences. The vast majority of kids simply took it as one of many classes, then never used those abilities ever again. Heck, I work in IT, and I never deal with "computer code" or "circuitry". I have not even tried to do component level diagnostics in over 20 years (back when a keyboard cost $100, instead of $10). At one time, it made sense to do things like trace out bad capacitors and replace them, when motherboards cost $350 and up. Today you can buy one for $50, so it is generally not worth even trying to fix them. Oh wow, do I remember those days! 675 MB hard drive, $1,800! 65 MB hard drive, $200. My cell phone now has more memory then that huge drive 20 years ago. And ESDI and RLL are as obsolete as MFM and PATA. And yes, my mom programmed in C, but when I tried to show her Visual C++, she could not make heads nor tails of it. This industry simply changes to much to expect that a class in school will make any difference in another 5 or 10 years. Most people simply do not want to know how their things work. Get called to their home and try to explain that their newest computer does not talk with the others on their wireless network because the DHCP was turned off and it is in the wrong Workgroup, and their eyes glaze over. To put it simply, they do not want to know how these things work or why. No more then making kids take an automotive course would enable them to fix their own cars. And the basics is just that, basics. I can teach people how to assemble a computer. Heck, I could teach a monkey how to assemble a computer. Assembly is the easy part, it is knowing what to get, why to get it, and what to do when things do not work right that is the real pain in the butt. When I learned BASIC, it worked like this: 10 INPUT "What is your name?", N$ 20 PRINT "Hello ";N$ 30 INPUT "How old are you?", A 40 PRINT "So ",N$,", you are ",A" years old." 50 INPUT "Does somebody else want to tell me their name and age?", B$ 60 IF B$ = "Y" GOTO 10 70 PRINT "Thank you, goodbye" 80 END Now take 20 adults who learned programming as kids, and ask them to explain what I just put up there. Heck, you can even take 10 adults who have learned more modern languages like Visual BASIC, and it is tricky to follow. And I did not even go more obscure, with GOSUB and RND commands. Heck, how many people in these forums can't even edit quotes, or add in images or video? Those are not complex things to do, simply playing with the [ quote ] and [ /quote ] commands, [ img ], [ video ] amd a few others. Yet I see them bungled all the time. I would not even consider that programming at all, but it is beyond a great many people. Let alone more complex things like multi-quoting. Sorry, but your belief that teaching basic programming will help kids out in the future is mistaken. Only about 10% of the kids will ever really understand what they are doing, and less then 10% of those will ever use it again in the future. We tried those types of things in the past, and they just never worked. It would be no more effective then making every child learn a musical insturment, thinking that that would help them become musicians in the future. Heck, BASIC has not even been included in Microsoft operating systems for over 12 years now (Windows ME was the last one to include it), and I doubt anybody has missed it. If your theory was correct, then they would not have gone over 12 years without including BASIC in their operating system. This feature would have been put back in several versions ago due to popular demand.
And yet, the new languages are mostly extentions of their origins. C was developed in 1970. Good C developers are worth their weight in gold to good C++ developers... and typically become great C++ devels. C++ is just C with classes. Knowing C, makes C++ a synch. C# is just more of the same. SQL is from 78 ffs. And once you understand the principals of Object Oriented programming, the majority of the differences are syntax. Perl is from 1987, and is in WIDE use. Cannot go wrong teaching Perl. The 90s brought us Java, javascript, HTML, python, PHP... which 20 years later are still how everything runs day to day on the internet. Even COBOL, FORTRAN, Erlang, and other forgotten languages are niche markets because of the importance of infrastructure markets that were created using them... if you can code em, you got a job. The linux shell in its current iteration of BASH is just extensions on sh... if you can code in the core you can code in the evolution... all these additions do is cut down on the amount of work you have to do because there are instructions and classes already provided which provide some if not all of that functionality. Teaching the staples of technology for a 10 year outlook is not hard. Teaching a "current" trend per semester wouldn't be a bad idea in high schools, having a foundation in programming staples. Once you think in terms of language principalities and understanding how they are interacting with, if nothing else, abstraction layers, picking up new languages is a couple of weeks/months work. I don't even know how many languages I can program in. It all just becomes a big matrix of desires, with an arsenal of tools that each do different things very well. Most "languages" are just hybrids of established type. Teaching those fundamentals now would make it a whole lot easier in the future... it is building a foundation of understanding the devices you use beyond the interface. So teaching fundamentals to elementary kids, who carry that on to high school... it should be fairly easy to produce different evolutions of programmers. How interesting would it be for all highschool kids to contribute to a new programming environment for 8 years, with 10+ years experience in the fundamentals, and each taskable iteration of the rests work... think about that. What could every high school kid on the planet create? What would they be prepared for in the future? If your 12 year old could build their own programs... it isn't actually a new concept... we just moved away from it. [video=youtube;Ud8WRAdihPg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ud8WRAdihPg#![/video] [video=youtube;SdL6dzWvm5M]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdL6dzWvm5M[/video] "The music is not in the piano, otherwise we would have to let it vote." -Alan Kay "And I think the reason computers have failed is that almost everybody, no matter which way they have tried to use computers, have wanted the computer to to be some sort of magic ointment over the suppurating wound of bad concepts. Â… But first you have to have the ideas."
#!/bin/bash Ask() { echo "What is your name?"; read N echo "Hello $N" echo "How old are you?"; read A echo "So $N, you are $A years old." } Ask while true; do read -p "Does somebody else want to tell me their name and age? " yn case $yn in [Yy]* ) Ask;; [Nn]* ) echo "Thank you, goodbye"; exit;; * ) echo "Please answer yes or no.";; esac done Same thing... different syntax.
Vastly different. Of course, programs can also be a lot longer now, since we have considerably more memory then we did back when I was doing that. Remember, even Bill Gates unerestimated where the growth would take us all. I thought my first "Super System" with 8 meg was killer (with a 700 MB hard drive), and had friends tell me I would never need that much RAM or drive space (1992). I just built one for my wife with 8 gigs of RAM and a 1.5 TB hard drive. A long ways from my 5k VIC-20.
10 INPUT "What is your name?", N$ echo "What is your name?"; read N 20 PRINT "Hello ";N$ echo "Hello $N" 30 INPUT "How old are you?", A$ echo "How old are you?"; read A 40 PRINT "So ",N$,", you are ",$A" years old." echo "So $N, you are $A years old." That strikes you as... vastly different? I mean sure we do away with the goto and insert a function and case argument... but... it is a better execution allowing for more correct and incorrect answers without crashing... If you cannot figure out the syntax, knowing basic well... you either aren't trying or I wonder how you learned basic to begin with.
Yes, it is very different. I never said I could not work out what the commands do, just that it is very different. The code is also quite a bit larger, but since computers are much more powerfull then they were before this is not a problem. "Code Bloat" is not nessicarily a bad thing, I remember having to try to cut code as much as I could just to make programs fit in the small amounts of memory we had 30 years ago. And I compare the various "state of the art" RPGs over the years, and remember being blown away by programs such as Wizardry and Bard's Tale, when comparing them to the original Collosal Cave Adventure and the Scott Adams programs. Then it was the "Gold Box" AD&D programs, now it is WoW and Guild Wars 2 (which takes up 14 gigs of data). Things we could not even dream of that long ago. And it is possible because of such power. If you check my code out, there are 261 characters in it. Your code has 344 characters. 71 words where my code was 55 words. I also could have pruned out an extra 8 characters, just by dropping the 0 on each line. And notice, I am saying nothing of the efficiency, or ease of use, just that the thinking behind programs today is vastly different then it was years ago. Now we can put very specific instructions and commands into our programs, something we could not do when I was doing it. So now we rarely get such bizzare responses as "Lp0 on fire" or "Not a typewriter". I learned BASIC back in the 1970's. And played with QBasic and Visual Basic a bit in the early to mid 1990's. But have not touched any programming since then. I never said it was incomprehensible, or that I could not work out what the intended actions would do. However, I am pretty proud I was able to hack out that bit of kludge code, having not had to work with anything like it in decades. Some things I never seem to be able to get rid of once I learn them, like the old debug command G=C800:1, which is still stuck in my brain over 20 years after it became obsolete.
Funny thing - when I was done with high school, I tried to pursue a quick degree program in IT. My parents, or at least my father, insisted that I go get a liberal arts education instead. Many years and thousands of dollars of debt later, I did end up opting for a wildly different degree.
need /nēd/ Verb Require (something) because it is essential or very important: "I need help now". Noun Circumstances in which something is necessary, or that require some course of action; necessity: "the need for food". Synonyms verb. want - require - demand - lack noun. want - necessity - requirement - poverty - lack
Again... your code would puke if you replied y instead of "Y", or Yes, or yes... or any reply other than "Y". That is why there are a few more words. It isn't "bloat". Nor is the code "vastly different". I would like to see an example of code in different languages that you do not find "vastly different". I mean, I believe I made my point to most rational people... people who have never coded a command in their lives can look at that and see that it is not terribly dissimilar.
Programmers these days aren't as concerned with character space anymore. A character is 1 byte out of hundreds of billions. Programmers these days are more concerned with proper structure and maintainability. And sometimes you need to sacrifice storage space and performance a bit to pull that off. Ctrl's is better structured, modular and less buggy. Well worth the 83 characters.
And I never said it was not. And that is exactly the kind of point I was trying to make. And it also has to be remembered that the idea of "case" was not even a consideration when I started. This is because most computers of the day (and none of the standard keypunch card formats) recognized a difference, I only put it in to make it easier to read. No more, no less. When doing COBOL on IBM 5081 cards, everything was upper case. Some terminals might recognize upper and lower case in display, but generally they were all treated the same. You have to realize, we are almost talking 2 different languages here. I started in an era of keypunch cards, waiting for operators to run your stack, and a 20 MB hard drive being the size of a dishwasher. But it is also an example of how things change. Something that far to many people do not realize happens in the IT industry. When I got my first cert, CNE was all the rage. Now my CNE is just an obscure reference that I do not even bother to put on a resume anymore. And this is something that tends to be lost to a lot of people.
That's what I figured. Thanks for being one of the pioneers of the field! I'm just starting out myself. Currently I'm doing a lot of work in C# and SQL
Well, my mother was really a pioneer. I played around with it in High School, wrote a few programs and subprograms, but that is about it. I realized by 1981 that I did not want to be a programmer, so when I graduated joined the military instead. I got back into it about 8 years later, when the entire industry had changed. The big mainframes were on the way out, and the small desktops were taking over. I got into batch files, working with the hardware, then networking them together. I also played around for several years with early telecommunications, running a BBS in the days before the Internet was known to most people. The thing is, I have seen the changes over the last 35 years. And I really see how worthless such instruction would be, because 98% of students would never do anything with that knowledge. And by the time they got to where they might use it for a career, it would be so outdated and obsolete that they might as well never have learned in the first place. This really is a field that unless you are working in it constantly, your skills become stale and outdated. Ask somebody who went to school in the mid to late 1980's, and you will find most of them had some kind of computer courses in school, often times involving programming as well as operation. Then ask them what they remember of that today. If you want to give computer training, keep it to the basics. How to work witht he operating system, how to use Word, maybe even setting up basic peer based LANs. And some light programming in a code system that has not changed significantly in 20 years (like HTML) would be good. But do not waste the time and money trying to teach them something like VB or C++. It would all be a waste of time and they will likely never do anything with it. But at least with learning HTML, they can create their own personal web pages if nothing else. And it gives them some basics in the logic, so if they do decide to go further in programming, they have a foundation to work off of.
I am not actually disagreeing with your point. I came up on the same stuff, playing the same games.... saving states to tape... I hate bloat. I am a very conservative coder. I try to create expressions which are as simple as possible to perform a function. Efficiency is one of those things lost on these kids My POINT was, that knowing certain basics, will leave students able to use languages that are not going anywhere in the next 6 years at least... and more importantly, provide them the fundamental understanding of several language structures and principals... so they have the capasity to pick up and run, learning any new languages they can from a position of programmatic fluency. I am not suggesting we teach them ONE language, I am suggesting we teach them heaps of them. I think every day should have 2 programming classes. We would build graduates that can compete in the modern workforce, rather than the industrial revolution. Hell I say you just dump 100 kids per class in a computer environment, one teacher dealing with 1000 students lessons. Intelligent tutoring from the software. INSTANT progress reports... in fact the environment can assign appropriate amounts of homework based on the students needs. You keep a security officer in each room while they do their work... cut down on a lot of costs... and kids would get a lot better education.
LOL! You might actually get a kick out of a documentary I got a few months ago. [video=youtube;LRhbcDzbGSU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU[/video] "Get Lamp" is the story of the early days in game programming, specifically text adventure games. Even to this day I remember XYZZY and PLUGH. And for those that remember the early days, it is made by the same people that several years ago made a great documentary on the early BBS systems. [video=youtube;dRap7uw9iWI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRap7uw9iWI[/video] I am currently on a break from school, 2 quarters into getting my BS in IT. And I gave these (and a few other such documentaries) to several of the instructors, since they are nowhere near old enough to remember what things were like in the "early days". The Department Head told us several times his first computer was an 80486. So them seeing things like this is the closest they will ever get to the "good old days", when the battles were not just PC Vs. Mac, but also the Atari ST, Amiga, and many others from the C-64 and TI-99/4A and TRS-80. Most computer users today I think are spoiled. They complain how expensive computers and software is, not realizing that while computers are now only a fraction of what they cost 20 years ago, the software cost has pretty much remained the same, significantly lower once you take inflation into account. Windows 3.1 or DOS 5.0 cost a person about $100, the same as Vista Home Premium. And Wizardrt or Bard's Tale also set a person back around $50, the cost of a just-released game today. Personally, I think there should be computer courses. Hardware is always a good type of course, since it also teaches diagnostic skills that can be usefull later on in almost any field, from auto mechanics and TV repair to medicine and many more fields. In my experience, some of the very best computer techs have also been auto mechanics. The skills really are almost the same, it is just the equipment that changes. And I always find it frustrating when I have to work with somebody who has absolutely no idea how to logically diagnose some piece of equipment, be it a computer, an M-2 50 cal machine gun, or why they can't get their X-Box to work on their new TV. So many people today are so used to having everything spoon fed to them, they do not have the slightest clue how to diagnose anything, other then trial and error.
