

What would happen to society if everyone learned to write simple programs in a high-level language? - amichail

My question is not whether this is feasible but rather what would happen in such a society?

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maurycy
Rather unlikely to happen because:

<http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf>

Quoting the abstract:

Learning to program is notoriously difficult. A substantial minority of
students fails in every introductory programming course in every UK
university. Despite heroic academic effort, the proportion has increased
rather than decreased over the years. Despite a great deal of research into
teaching methods and student responses, we have no idea of the cause. It has
long been suspected that some people have a natural aptitude for programming,
but until now there has been no psychological test which could detect it.
Programming ability is not known to be correlated with age, with sex, or with
educational attainment; nor has it been found to be correlated with any of the
aptitudes measured in conventional 'intelligence' or 'problem-solving-ability'
tests. We have found a test for programming aptitude, of which we give
details. We can predict success or failure even before students have had any
contact with any programming language with very high accuracy, and by testing
with the same instrument after a few weeks of exposure, with extreme accuracy.
We present experimental evidence to support our claim. We point out that
programming teaching is useless for those who are bound to fail and pointless
for those who are certain to succeed.

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maurycy
There's also one small funny bit about it I forgot to include in the previous
post.

Currently my girlfriend studies philosopy. Don't know how in other countries,
but in Poland, philosophy undergrands have to master the logic. Nothing fancy,
basically the easiest elementary logic. And you know what? According to her, a
lot of people have problems with it. I've had very similar experiences before
with friends studying liberal arts and science that were required to learn
logic.

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corentin
Well, whatever happens when a population is more educated. So a slightly
better economy, I guess.

