We should rethink how we teach people to code | deadSimpleTech
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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.

  • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Gotcha. It’s still a fun question to think about though.

    My uni switched from teaching their intro classes in Java to python the year before I started, and in defense of python, I have to say: it’s so simple for small things, that it gets out of the way in the classroom. Sure, it’s not great for big projects, but it is very easy to demonstrate concepts in a readable manner.

    (That was the second program I enrolled in, btw. The first one, at another uni, they started with Haskell. No joke. And while I do appreciate Haskell and functional languages in general now, maybe in part due to this, it just got in the way of the concepts they were actually trying to teach.)

    But in any case: uni isn’t really there to teach you to code. That’s something you are supposed to pick up on along the way, or on the job.