Thursday, October 25, 2012

Programming: Is it Skill or Knowledge?

This is a kind of questiony/answery post. I'm investigating scripting. I am assuming that a lot of you who are reading this now know what scripting means; so I'm going to get on with the post.

It's been debatable by so many people whether being able to write code is an art or knowledge, and if you say "Oh anybody can learn programming". You're wrong. Because my Nan can't even change her home page, she's only 70. But lets get on.
    Knowledge and skill are completely different things. It's like being able to draw, it's not Knowledge, it's a talent you, and you alone were born with. For example, I'm awful at drawing, but my sense of Art is on the computer with Photoshop.

After reading that, what are your thoughts?

I mean, scripting could be knowledge, you learn it, you're not born knowing how to program, are you? But then again, you're not born knowing 1+1. Now you could work that out with your eyes shut. It's like saying that Maths is a skill. Or is it?

Maths has been an ancient subject because it's main, core. You can't have a planet without a core, you can't have a human without a heart, you can't have a Sun without a center. All those examples are things those individual objects need, like us, we need a heart and a brain. Maths is core, and it's also very attendant to programming. I just got a level 7c in my Maths Test, which is on course for A+/A*. Other people in my class got level 5c. So how is it knowledge? It must be skill. But it could be knowledge...

Cleverness, remember, all of you are born with a certain span your brain can learn, as you start to get older, you start to get wiser and it's harder to learn. As I said before, my Nan can't change her homepage on Chrome (You grow older and can't learn that easily).

My verdict is, debatable.
You can't choose between them, because each and every one of those reasons is valid, in their own way. You can't just blame age on bad-grade, and you can't blame skill on high-grade. It's just, you, and it's up to our generation to sort out our Nan's homepage's.

You must remember, we were born into a world of computers, our parents were not (unless you're reading this in ten years time or so!).

Another question for you:
What is the fastest travel?
Social Network..
e.g Twitter. Each tweet (if you're where I am) travels from UK to Canada back to UK every tweet I send, that means it's travelling faster than Concorde, Boeing, and Airbus. It's travelling at the speed of light. And that's what we were born into... The speed of light...

1 comment:

  1. Actually, it's waaayyyyy slower than the speed of light. The speed is actually the speed of radio waves, because you tweet, it gets sent into a satellite, and then to a person in Canada.

    ReplyDelete

Write your comment here... OR Flingi will eat you