Ask HN: Would you tell your kids to learn to code?

4 points by Thanemate 8 days ago | 8 comments

I'm luckily old enough to have both early exposure to the joy of solving problems with programming and mathematics, but I fully embrace the fact that the field doesn't have any place for those who enjoy the activity itself anymore. Now it's all about feeling empowered to prompt on subscription and see magic unfolding, and it's a matter of time until the languages we know know are treated like a low level abstraction in the same way assembly is.

With this trajectory of our field, would you instill a sense of curiosity and creativity towards programming if your son or daughter expresses an interest towards it? If yes, why? If no, why?

grayhatter 8 days ago |

I would teach my kid anything and everything they were willing to learn.

I imagine you have some sort of argument, I'm guessing it's a flavor of optimizing for opportunity cost?

Try to apply that same argument to English, or math... does it still hold? I'd hope not!

Instead, teach them to find joy in life. Encourage them to find passion in something creative or expressive.

I would teach my kid programming, I'll also teach them how to make a fire from friction. It doesn't matter if they ever actually need to use it, it'll make them a better human. Maybe they find they love programming, maybe they find out they love backpacking and decide to hike the PCT.

Either way I've given them a skill that might help them with some future I can't possibly predict for them.

jonahbenton 8 days ago |

For sure, the same way that agentic abilities to read and write don't obviate devoting human cognitive attention to those skills, in fact, as study after study show, the cognitive offloading/debt incurred by over reliance on agentic cognitive processing is as bad for the brain as sedentary lifestyle is for the body. Programming is yet again different cognitive work than human language reading/writing- the sequential/logical precision and the abstraction creation AND the interactive functionality are unique and valuable. Use of prompt-> code techniques for code or asset authoring AND use of LLMs to provide non-deterministic interactive elements widen the creative landscape. They have to be properly scaffolded, of course, to require requisite cognitive input to get useful output- giving people cannons they can light with a match is wrong and inhumane. But within those to-be-developed regulatory guardrails, the activity of interactive system creation including stroke by stroke visual creation and line by line code creation is still super cool, fun, and useful for kids to experience.

Also I don't see professional software becoming "black-boxed" the way compiler produced machine language is or the way ML models are. Certain isolated components whose characteristics and behaviors can be sufficiently and more efficiently specified and verified with human language sources will be black boxes but in many circumstances the code is the most efficient and precise and correct rendition and that will be the material in which human work occurs. Cheers.

wsintra2022 8 days ago |

Yes. Have and did. Also something I thought would be useful, I showed them codex and pay a subscription. Another time later I sat down with them and done a code repo walk through. This time without codex and refactored the codebase, talking through refactoring and modularity and explaining the limitations of prompt driven development. I believe we are at a unique time for learning and those who are curious enough and have the attention for it will find new joys in learning to write software and understand systems. We live in a system so learning how to write programs becomes a way to start seeing systems. Ie. Critical thinking, the gold standard!

downbad_ 8 days ago |

>solving problems with programming and mathematics, but I fully embrace the fact that the field doesn't have any place for those who enjoy the activity itself anymore. Now it's all about feeling empowered to prompt on subscription and see magic unfolding, and it's a matter of time until the languages we know know are treated like a low level abstraction in the same way assembly is.

You think there's no much point in learning to code by hand anymore as a means to financial freedom?

sfmz 8 days ago | |

"learn to code" is probably over...

Remember the mean-spirited viral meme of 'learn to code' aimed at BuzzFeed journos in 2019? ... not aging well.

I replit'd a travel-site since yesterday: ~8-ish hours: front-end, back-end, auth, mapping, geo-coding, points-of-interest, planning, image carossels, weather-integration (not sure if the weather thing is working), routing.

None of it by hand, no SQL, no Linux provisioning, no learning Map api calls, no typescript, no javascript / webpack bundling, no trying to figure out why i can't get things to vertically center, no css.

There will be like ~1000x more code w/ 1/100x wages.

There's probably space for people with CS PhDs -- but that's not exactly the same as 'learn to code'

yepyoukno 8 days ago |

Why not start with making scratch games or blinking rpi lights or something?

Make it about problem solving and fun? Forget about “industry” and what everyone else is doing!

I too started at an early age, and it was just about fun for me!

armchairhacker 8 days ago |

I’d introduce them to it and see if they’re interested. If so, I’d give them more and eventually various branches that may particularly interest them (e.g. CS theory). If not, I wouldn’t push them.

turtleyacht 8 days ago |

Yes, of course. Programming is a semiotic art, where the palette is letters and the words make up an executable canvas.

There is no invention like it, and all other fields can leverage it.