Teaching coding is hot. Codecademy famously signed up New York’s mayor as a user (and recently roped in $10m of venture capital), and the popular online-teaching concern Khan Academy just launched a suite of programming lessons. Backlash followed: career programmers have scoffed at the idea of “coding as literacy,” while an academic study claimed that some people can code, and others simply can’t.
Bret Victor, a former interface designer for Apple, thinks they’re all wrong. In a devastating and persuasive interactive essay, he argues that DIY programming sites are mostly useless because of their opaque interfaces. (Using Khan’s online tutorials, he writes, is like trying to learn how to cook by stabbing at random buttons on an unlabeled microwave.)
via technology review
October 1, 2012
