GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Transitions, and Programming As Teaching

Must be something in the air. I just read Eugene Wallingford's report from this past week's SIGCSE meeting (SIGCSE is an ACM subgroup dedicated to Computer Science Education). It includes mention of a quote attributed to Max Planck:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

So the very next two weblog entries that Bloglines showed me could both benefit from that same quote.

For Michael Kölling (as reported by Eugene), it's Computer Science Teachers.
For Diego Doval, it's Economists.
For Ned Batchelder, it's Old Media.

By the way, I think it's very cool that the online folks have framed that last "battle" so well. The Old Media has more money, but starts this particular discussion at a terrible disadvantage, simply by virtue of being called "The Old Media".

And also by the way, Madge, if you're reading this: Eugene Wallingford's weblog "Knowing and Doing", is well worth following. Though it's nominally about Teaching Computer Science, it is written in a general enough way that the insights therein frequently apply to any kind of teaching. Or programming, for that matter.

I often write about the readability of programs, about how one of the most important aspects of any program is how well it conveys its algorithms, assumptions, context, environment, alternatives, engineering tradeoffs, etc., to other humans. What Eugene's writing has done is to help me see programming as teaching.

Yow, I just did a Google search for Programming as Teaching and only 18 pages came up, and many of those think of programming as teaching the computer how to do something, instead of thinking of it as teaching other programmers how you solved this problem. I think the best programs do the latter.
8:11:59 PM comment/