In discussions of programming education, the argument is often made that learning to program shouldn’t be made easier. This is the Let’s Filter Out the Idiots argument, common also to the fields of law and medicine (or so I’m told). The idea, basically, is that the discipline must retain a face of esotericism to the outside world as a barrier, the passage through which marks a rite of passage for initiates, thus preserving standards within the profession. I’ll concede that there are actually a couple good justifications for a general attitude of anti-idiotarianism:
- First, law, medicine, and computing are genuinely complex fields, so a large degree of esotericism is unavoidable.
- Second, in these fields, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. In fact, in the case of doctors and lawyers, the purpose of the face of esotericism is likely not at all to avoid creating bad doctors and lawyers—their certification processes are sufficiently rigorous to avoid that—but rather to discourage laymen from thinking that they can practice amateur medicine and law. There may be an element of protectionism to this, but it’s mostly a good idea. Even programmers have legitimate cause to fear amateurs, for amateur programmers tend to create Frankenstein systems, messes which create problems for everyone involved (see this example of a near miss).
However, the anti-idiotarian arguments for maintaining educational barriers to entry are bogus:
- First, keeping the first phase of education difficult is supposedly necessary to weed out the incompetents, but this is backwards: if people are getting certified who shouldn’t, the problem lies with the certification standards, not the number or quality of the people pursuing certification. (Of course, programmer certification remains problematic, but that’s a whole other issue. See here and here.)
- The second bogus argument goes like this: in any field, to be much good at what you do, you need a solid grasp of the next two or three layers of abstraction beneath where you primarily work, e.g. decent web developers understand the basics of HTTP, DNS, caching, database performance issues (if not the implementation details), etc, and beyond that they have a working conception of operating systems and general programming tools; essentially, you can’t be a good programmer if you treat your tools and development platform like magic. But, if the technoratti consensus is correct, this, sadly, sums up what’s wrong with a very large percent of people out there who call themselves programmers. So far this is all very true, but then some go on to claim that enabling easier entry to the field necessarily means enabling the next wave of push-button “programmers”. This is wrong. What makes such people bad or “fake” programmers is that they don’t understand essential aspects of programming and computer science, not how they acquired what knowledge they do (or don’t) have.
The zealous anti-idiotarians are missing the point. Making the basics of the field easier to learn benefits everyone, sparing pain for the incapable and hyper-competent alike: those who lack the disposition can get out earlier while those who stay can cover more material in less time, and just maybe a few capable students won’t get discouraged as they otherwise might by the overwhelming minutia of the practice of programming.