Molesworth and the New Latin 'In his speech [...] the Education Secretary Michael Gove appeared to accept in its entirety the argument that ICT had become little more than training in office skills and something far more rigorous was required [...] While Alex Hope's slogan "coding is the new Latin" did not appeal to some, it must have appealed to the …
as any fule kno...
It's done in the style of the Molesworth books, somewhat hinted at by the title. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Molesworth
Interesting take on the question... the underlying point is about why the education curriculum is about to include teaching computer programming at some level to all students - that for most it will be as useful as Latin is, hence "it's the new Latin".
"as any fule kno...
It's done in the style of the Molesworth books, somewhat hinted at by the title. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Molesworth"
I don't need no stinking Wikipedia to tell me that, but it doesn't make the article any easier to read.
"the underlying point is about why the education curriculum is about to include teaching computer programming at some level to all students - that for most it will be as useful as Latin is, hence "it's the new Latin"."
Good. Because "most" is an improvement over the current curriculum which is no bloody use to anyone at all.
.... though as an engineer (microelectronics design) and previously a maths graduate I always maintain that Latin and the way you learn that sentences etc have a logical construction of correcly ordered/conjugated/declined nouns, adjectives and verbs etc has been an invaluable foundation for applying similar logical techniques to maths and design!
Quite agree. One is reminded of the Russell essay on education in which he claims that the only thing he remembers from his school Latin is the genitive plural of "pulex', and that the teaching of the language in schools is now of any use. However, he writes this in a clarity of language that can only have come from his having 'done the classics'. Helped a bit with his 'Principia', too.
>>>Was it worth the effort?
Nope. I did fight my way through all of Feersum Endjinn, and I needn't have bothered really. I suppose I ought to re-read it, to see if I was being unfair. I couldn't be arsed to get through A Clockwork Orange because of that, so I don't know if it's caused me to miss something good...
> Nope. I did fight my way through all of Feersum Endjinn, and I needn't have bothered really. I
> suppose I ought to re-read it, to see if I was being unfair. I couldn't be arsed to get through A
> Clockwork Orange because of that, so I don't know if it's caused me to miss something good...
I haven't seen any solid research on this, but I suspect that some readers find it much easier to tolerate variant-dialect writing than others do. It's unlikely that everyone who learns to read English, or even everyone who's a "good reader" of English (however you want to defined that), develops precisely the same cognitive capabilities for that purpose. Thanks to neurological research, we know that's not true of many other mental facilities; even something relatively simple like being able to find your way around an area you're familiar with appears to have at least two distinct neurological "implementations".
So for some people this sort of novel (you could add Hoban's /Riddley Walker/ and Gilman's /Moonwise/ to the list) is likely much more work than for others, and thus less likely to be "worth it".
Maybe it's for the Heritage Industry?
You can go to an industrial museum today, there seem to be hundreds, and see somebody working a Victorian loom. In the future you may be able to look around a Heritage software house, see somebody in a BOFH T-shirt and be told:
"And here C programmers used to chase memory leaks"
Maybe.
"In 5 years, it'll all be done in India"
I think you meant "all the tedious, boring and slow stuff will be done in India". I still have to see something that reaches the quality level of MySQL out of India and I predict that they will never, ever write something as great as Linux or Postgres. I am absolutely not scared of people who do not have a rigorous education nor the ambition to acquire that. There will be more interesting software emanate from Norway than India also for the next 200 years.
There's no reason a well educated Indian (hint - their comp sci education is probably better than ours is now) cannot produce work to the same standard as a well educated anybody-else. Any nation that invests in education will come out ahead of any that doesn't. I'm not thinking specifically of India, but any nation where the education system hasn't fallen into ruins, for example Scandinavia, China, south-east Asian nations such as Singapore and South Korea, and almost anywhere else that isn't the UK or US.
"There's no reason a well educated Indian (hint - their comp sci education is probably better than ours is now)"
You pulled that one entirely out of thin air. Have you ever spoken to them and probed their depth of conceptual expertise ? Their knowledge is mostly very narrow and non-conceptual. They might know all the details of win32, but they have never bothered to look at the X window system, Display Postscript or read research papers.
Most of them won't even know the difference of a tree and a hashtable. They won't know why hashtables must be faster and how you build them. And that is just one specific example.
I don't you why this is, but I suspect Indians are mostly in IT to make lots of money (as compared to other job in India), but not because they are fascinated of it and want to improve the state of computer science affairs.
The difference of Norway and India is that of a few excellent and the armies of the mediocre. Just look at the results in the open source sphere.
... so I was working my way down page 1, thinking "Even Molesworth never spelled quite this badly", not realising that this was all setup for a gag on page 2, which duly arrived and left me unprepared for the even better gag that followed clutching its coattails.
What, no Basil Fotherington-Thomas?
Some of the Molesworthian spelling mistakes are ah...wrong. 6/10 Stob see me during the brake. You need to swot more.
As an aside, The Compleet Molesworth was on Waterstone's 'Books You Always Meant To Read' display just a couple of weeks ago. There are worse ways to spend a tenner.
Cave! Cave! Here comes Sigismund!
At uni/poly we had a Harris S6 mini - in a tall rack case in the middle of the machine room.
Yup Engineering got DEC's - compsci got antique (even then) Vulcan's :-)
Anyhoo this POC^Wmachine was proudly being shown off during open day to the goggle eyed prospectives for next years course. I was working on a terminal just outside next to the sole plotter and a friend was on call as sysadmin and lecturer helldesker.
Anyway one of the brighter students noted a plastic bucket stored in the bottom of the Harris cabinet and asked why it was there. Lecturer was in obvious panic so he turned to my mate Tony Smith (not of Reg fame!). rather than explain there was a hole in the roof that the uni was too skint/lazy to repair he explained how computers operate on bits. Everybody nodded. He then asked if everyone had seen a "pachinko" machine (again everyone nodded including lecturer). He explained that computers are like very very complex pachinko machines and eventually the bits fall out of the bottom of the machine into said bucket. Part of his duties is to empty the full bucket back into the top of the machine. Again everyone (including lecturer nodded).
I had a really hard time not breaking out into hysterical laughter.
2005.
While I was looking that up, I found a bit I hadn't read before:
"... neither the author(s) nor Apress shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this work."
In the 80's it was perhaps relevant to teach classes about 'computers' in the same way that people where knew about 'cars' in the 1900's: designing, building, maintaining and driving being all much the same thing back then. It wasn't many years later that thermodynamics, automotive design, production line management, garage mechanics and driving skills became different subjects.
By all means teach the equivalent of driving skills at school; I think of perhaps typing and the theory/practice of email/spreadsheets/databases and cyber security. But, to my mind anything much beyond that is a specialist subject these days. The territory of after school clubs and college courses.
Computer Science at what was O'level, should still be an option for those that want it.
It's what got me to go on to study it at degree level, and the same skills/youth are needed in this country.
I find it sad that it has been replaced with ICT, which has essentially become secretarial skillz.
There should be the two streams: Computer Science/IT and Technology End User. Each serve their purpose.
Just as there are still Chemistry, Pure Maths and Physics as options, there must be Computer Science/IT too. To say otherwise is to say we want no future in scientific/technology progress.
No, it's not.
Entry into programming is as easy as ever in this modern world of the 'App' on iOS and Android. At the very least an intro to programming course is needed to teach kids that programming is possible, and not some magic done by high wizards.
Computers play a huge, huge part in everyone's lives these days. It's irresponsible not to give them a foot in the doorway to the huge world of manipulating and programming them. We don't teach kids just to read, we teach them to write as well. Intro to programming is the equivalent.
Ability to program != ability to write maintainable code.
Ability to copy'n'paste != ability to understand what you are copying does.
Ability to drag'n'drop != ability to understand the visual idiom and where it breaks down.
Case in point: Design a simple web-page layout in MS Word with the words 'Hello World' centred in bold type. Save as HTML. Open in notepad. Point to the 3% of the cruft that actually makes the words 'Hello World' appear on the page in the right place. Explain what the other 97% does.
There may be a place for a "computer skills" course which is about learning to use applications or one a bit more management oriented covering stuff like systems analysis, writing system specs etc.
Then "The IT course" could be the kind of mentally stimulating exercise many of an older generation of IT workers got from their ZX80, BBC micro, Archimedes etc. Every student gets a Raspberry Pi as base hardware they can expand on hardware and get into coding. Frankly I think our schools system couldn't cope, it would be better done as an Open University type scheme but maybe a bit of a hybrid so in school there is a facilitator, who also participates in the learning and keeps an eye on individuals activities.
My kid started an IT A level at what has been called "the best state school in Sheffield". It was deadly dull, the teachers seemed to know little about what they were teaching and probably misunderstood the syllabus. At the end of year one all but one kid failed the AS level so the school withdrew the option to do year 2.
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