* * * * *
                                        
   With infinite resources one can even make pigs fly. It's still not a good
                                     idea.
                                        
> Well the good news is that the test scores of New York City public- school
> students are up this year from last. The bad news is that still barely a
> third of them passed math or reading tests.
> 
> And that’s despite the fact that a number of teachers have been accused of
> tampering with test scores.
> 
> So what should we do? Teach everyone computer science!
> 

Via Instapundit [1], “The folly of teaching computer science to high school
kids | New York Post [2]”

Strange as it may appear, I agree that teaching computer science to high
school students is folly. Computers are (still) expensive (compared to books,
paper, pens and pencils) and fragile. There's too much to fully understand
[3] (even I, who have been using computers for something like thirty years,
still can't troubleshoot a Microsoft Windows issue, much to the dismay of my
father who occasionally asks) and much of what is hot now goes out of fashion
in a few years (over the past thirty years, I've seen the rise and fall of
both Java [4] and Perl [5], and Microsoft go from a juggernaut controlling
the industry to a now mostly irrelevant bank with a quaint hobby in software,
for example).

While I was in college, I saw the the first programming language taught in
the computer science department change no less than three times! Back in high
school, I took the programming course in Pascal  [6] (which is pretty much a
dead language these days) on an obsolete computer (the Apple II [7] back in
the late 80s) and I was lucky in that I was able to use the only computer
with two floppy drives! (which meant I could compile my code nearly twice as
fast as other people in the class). And I can count on one finger the number
of people who went on in life as a programmer.

And the sad thing is, computer science doesn't need computers to be taught.
It's mostly math-centric theory. It's software engineering that requires the
use of computers. Teaching “programming” is going to be expensive if you want
to include all students [8]. And I'm not alone in this view [9] (link via
Reddit [10]).

[1] http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/214946/
[2] http://nypost.com/2015/09/20/the-folly-of-teaching-
[3] http://prog21.dadgum.com/129.html
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
[8] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2007/01/02.2
[9] http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/jeff-atwood-learning-code-overrated-
[10] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3mlhr4/jeff_atwood_learni

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.