December 10, 2013

Clarifying Coding

With the upcoming Hour of Code, there’s been a lot of confusion as to the definition of what “coding” is and why it’s useful, and I thought I’d contribute my thoughts.

Rather than talking about “coding”, I prefer to think of “communicating with computers”. Coding, depending on its definition, is one of many ways that a human can communicate with a computer; but I feel that the word “communicating” is more powerful than “coding” because it gets to the heart of why we use computers in the first place.

We communicate with computers for many different reasons: to express ourselves, to create solutions to problems, to reuse solutions that others have created. At a minimum, this requires basic explorational literacy: knowing how to use a mouse and keyboard, using them to navigate an operating system and the Web, and so forth. Nouns in this language of interaction include terms like application, browser tab and URL; verbs include click, search, and paste.

These sorts of activities aren’t purely consumptive: we express ourselves every time we write a Facebook post, use a word processor, or take a photo and upload it to Instagram. Just because someone’s literacies are limited to this baseline doesn’t mean they can’t do incredibly creative things with them.

And yet communicating with computers at this level may still prevent us from doing what we want. Many of our nouns, like application, are difficult to create or modify using the baseline literacies alone. Sometimes we need to learn the more advanced skills that were used to create the kinds of things that we want to build or modify.

This is usually how coders learn how to code: they see the digital world around them and ask, “how was that made?” Repeatedly asking this question of everything one sees eventually leads to something one might call “coding”.

This is, however, a situation where the journey may be more important than the destination: taking something you really care about and asking how it’s made–or conversely, taking something imaginary you’d like to build and asking how it might be built–is both more useful and edifying than learning “coding” in the abstract. Indeed, learning “coding” without a context could easily make it the next Algebra II, which is a terrifying prospect.

So, my recommendation: don’t embark on a journey to “learn to code”. Just ask “how was that made?” of things that interest you, and ask “how might one build that?” of things you’d like to create. You may or may not end up learning how to code; you might actually end up learning how to knit. Or cook. Or use Popcorn Maker. Regardless of where your interests lead you, you’ll have a better understanding of the world around you, and you’ll be better able to express yourself in ways that matter.

© Atul Varma 2021