The Forgotten Half of Computer Literacy

Gruber today noted that the New York Times is adding an API to their campaign finance data (bravo!). He also pointed to an article from 2006 titled "The programmer as journalist: a Q&A with Adrian Holovaty".

The interview is pretty concise and lays out how and why journalism can better be accomplished with help from software. Holovaty breaks down the journalistic process of collecting, filtering and disseminating information and how computer automation can be applied to each step, leading to better journalism. Near the end, he argues that all journalists should have at least some experience with programming, if for no other reason than just to know what is possible.

His points are persuasive, but they're also applicable to almost any field - not just journalism. I believe that everyone should at least know how to write software in the same way that everyone should be able to write in general.

Literacy describes the ability to read and write. When we talk about computer literacy, we usually think of the ability to use software - which I would liken to the "reading" part. We often ignore the "writing" part - the ability to make software. But writing software is incredibly powerful. If you write a page-turning novel, it inspires the imagination of everyone who reads it. If you write an informative article, all its readers are enlightened. Likewise, great software entertains and/or empowers every person who makes use of it.

The analogy holds up pretty well. No - it holds up too well - it's not an analogy at all! Writing software is writing. It might have an apparently arcane grammar, but making software is merely writing down instructions that a computer can understand. And the language is not more complicated than English. Have you seen English? It's the most bastardized, crazy language on the planet! The languages we use to talk to computers are incredibly simple - necessarily so. Computers aren't going to pick the correct meaning of a word out of a dozen possibilities based on context. They're not going to detect our sarcasm in step two of the instructions we give them. They need to be told exactly what to do in the simplest way possible, and programming languages are the way we do that. Consequently, programming languages have only gotten simpler over the years. Strong typing is going the way of the dodo. How often do you need to know what a pointer is any more? All the complicated things are getting hidden away in libraries or abstracted by the VM. There has never been a easier time to become a programmer than today.

I don't believe that everyone has to become a "programmer" any more than everyone has to become a "writer". But everyone should be able to write; a sentence, a paragraph, an essay, a script that their computer executes.