It's fair to say that the tech industry at the moment is not in a good place. Software engineers tend to be detached, demotivated and unwilling to care much about the work they're doing beyond their paycheck. Code quality is poor on the whole, made worse by the current spate of vibe coding and whatever other febrile ideas come out of Sam Altman's brain. Much of the software that we write is either useless or actively hurts people. And the talented, creative people that we most need in the industry are pushed to the margins of it.
Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.
When I was a kid in France it was Basic on TI and Casio graphing calculators, while in principle I agree that not every child will enjoy math, the sieve of Eratosthenes, LCM and GCD are good exercises for a first program.
And i think it’s easy to grasp that it’s a lot less tedious to write a program for it, than to do it by hand.
The English national curriculum exposes every child to programming of some sort. 10 years ago it was 8yo kids learning Scratch, all of them.
I posted about it at the time: it turns out scratch is probably the answer, scratch is probably still the answer
in high school maths and computers they learn python.
my kid has no wish to become a professional dev, but can wield python as is useful to them.
When I was a kid in France it was Basic on TI and Casio graphing calculators, while in principle I agree that not every child will enjoy math, the sieve of Eratosthenes, LCM and GCD are good exercises for a first program. And i think it’s easy to grasp that it’s a lot less tedious to write a program for it, than to do it by hand.
I hadn’t seen this post of yours before. I like it. I like it a lot.
My $SPROG can’t really read very well yet but she can open a saved program in Scratch and run it and show off the results, in SUGAR. I was so proud.
IoM cribs from the ENC, here’s to them cribbing that bit! See if you can get in there …