Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Does code matter?

Three years ago, I spent a little time with Codecademy (post: Codecademy, again). My profile is still there, from that time.

My purpose was to review progress by looking at the tools that were available. For a month, I went through the lessons and worked the exercises. It was interesting to see the on-line instruction. Naturally, I found a few bugs but overlooked them. At the time, it was free; now, there is a Pro option with more of a focus on results.

Also, at the time, I saw testimonials about people starting careers with this approach. That was interesting. Today, I ran into another (different method) that represents the time. The guy has blogged about his introduction into coding and the success that he has found.
Then, I saw that one of morning show hosts talked to someone about an effort to teach coding to women. There are thousands of jobs open, I understand.

Hence, this little reminder. One problem with so many people just coding is that we're losing sight of issues related to quality (many issues). And, one sees this lack everywhere. Quality would include the user perspective, especially concerns related to safety, stability, and such.

I have already written about little businesses being bitten (Content and more). I just ran across an issue myself the past week: Technology's impact. So, we have issues related to content's management, efficacy of technology's use, and whole lot more.

But, a very important one relates to this theme: Does code matter? Based upon my experience, this glut of jobs is short-sighted. Code does not provide the business intelligence that everyone is after. Now, if code is mainly small perturbations (such as was brought by macro ability in spread sheets), then, that could very well be content related.

However, how many times do we need to re-invent the wheel?

Remarks: Modified: 03/23/2017

03/23/2017 -- Two recent videos (stumbled upon them). 1) Peter Metzger talks about his 31 years with Emacs. He shows a little of the history of computing devices. Run down memory lane. But, nice to see the old thing, Emacs, still having traction. 2) Which then brings up Richard Stallman. Richard started Emacs ball rolling (some have followed his sainthood into the editor wars - Emacs vs VI/VIM).

Also, he was first in looking at truth maintenance. But, in this video, Richard talks about his free software initiative and emphasizes, time and again, that purty systems, like Apple, have created a jail, made it purty, and then convinced people to jail themselves. He does not like what I call the dumbing device. He stresses surveillance. I see it as a tether to nonsense. Hence, I am 1G/2G, even in this day of talk about 5G. In terms of truth maintenance, Richard and his advisor (Sussman) worked on constraint satisfaction. Another aspect deals with defeasible reasoning.


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