[Edu-sig] Re: Programming for the fun of it

[Dethe Elza]

Kirby wrote:
> So lets not remove the "more interesting career" incentive from
> the model -- some programming experience would open new doors
> in many of these scenarios (including, but not limiting our
> scope to already-employed adults).

Agreed.  Actually, if this were a class I think the target audience would
be at-risk teens, women re-entering the workforce and/or retraining for
the tech world, and the economically disadvantaged (a group whose
constituents change with geography).  These are the folks with the most
to gain by adding programming skills to their repetoire, and often the
ones with the least inclination to learn programming having been told
that it is hard, that you must be a genius, that it's boring, etc.

> The goal of "fixing the software you use" is realistic in an
> open source context in many cases, but most software users
> today have no ability to access the source code of the
> products they're using.  If Microsoft Windows or Word has
> bugs, you'll have to wait for Microsoft to fix them -- even
> if you're a top notch programmer.

Fixing the software you use is mostly a matter of usability, like learning
how to hide the 90% of Word you *don't* use to make the rest more
accessible.  Also, much of the software we use today is not word or
excel, it's websites (which generally have awful usability).  A case in
point is my local library system -- it never remembers who I am so
if I want to reserve a book I have to enter my full name, a system-assigned
code (14 digits) and my chosen password.  If I want to next check
my account to see when the books I have out are due I have to enter
all this information again.  Of course, the right way to solve this would
be to give home users the option of setting a cookie.  But then I still
wouldn't be able to check on the due dates for both my card and
my wife's card easily.  But with Python I can open an arbitrary url (or a
whole series of urls) rather easily, extract the data, and output the
results
in either HTML or Tkinter, and voila! I've "fixed" someone else's
software.

Note that the fix is specific to my own situation, so there may never be
impetus for the library to even recognize this as a problem, much less
fix it (especially since most libraries rely on canned, proprietary
third-party
software which they couldn't fix if they wanted to).  This is the kind of
fix people will never see unless they learn rudimentary (at least)
programming.

--Dethe