Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

If you're not a systems thinker (and most humans are not), then 80% of the instruction time of programming has NOTHING to do with syntax, and EVERYTHING to do with hidden state, and the rules of the runtime. Basic programming should be taught at the whiteboard, not the screen.

How many Python+Ruby+Java+C+Cpp+Javascript programmers are there in the world? It's far, far less than ~750 million Excel users. And while not all of those Excel users are building complex financial models, they are doing a type of coding that is meaningful and powerful.

So I reflect the original question back: How do you demarcate the realm of "programming" such that 750MM excel programmers are on one side of the line, and all the fizz-buzz-segfault l33t hackers are on the other?

More importantly, what does the salary distribution of Excel-wielding VPs vs. Emacs coding grunts say about the actual economic value of these different partitions of coders?

“Most programmers are terrible at teaching real people to program... Basic programming should be taught at the whiteboard, not the screen.” Wut I don’t think *anything* should be taught at the whiteboard if it can be avoided & it seems borderline insane to do that with code

I don't think it can be avoided. I learned to code by starting with simple runtimes (LOGO, BASIC). But once you get beyond that to procedural abstraction, collections of refs, loop variables, etc. - then you need to get a whiteboard and really walk folks thru the runtime model.

I didn't empathize with the lack of ability to model arbitrary systems until I tried explain for-loop (in Python) to somebody in a car. They *could not* understand how or why the loop var changed values.

I have sheets & sheets of paper from when I was 12 or 13, and I was designing my Star Trek BBS game, with full ANSI graphics and a random universe generator. There are functions I wrote out, traced through the execution, thought about corner cases, etc.