Doing Your Own Dental Work

Now I like some Dentists, they generally have a sense of humor, especially for a group of professionals who generally strike more fear in people than the IRS. I like what they can do, fix teeth, an organ of the human body which seems to have been the most poorly designed one. They decay, break, are misaligned, fall out, and all sorts of other such things. But despite that I would never want to do my own dentistry. Nor would I want to learn how to do my own colonoscopy.

Now what made this most obvious was a piece I read in the MIT Tech. I guess students on the newspaper must write about something. Or perhaps the author really believes what they have said.

Programming lies at the heart of a modern education. Whether it relates to engineering, finance, or even the arts and humanities, computation is used across all fields to achieve what was once unimaginable. Yet, despite its ever-increasing prominence in industry and research, MIT has not instituted introductory computer science as a General Institute Requirement (GIR).

Now typing is also at the heart of modern education but I never took a course in that as well. Yes, I know it shows at times, many times. But programming you just pick up as you may need it. I suspect that MIT Sloan does not "teach" Excel. You better have absorbed it somewhere. And they have.

The author continues:

I find it surprising that a good number of students graduate from MIT without any kind of programming experience. I have found that those not familiar with coding often feel strongly about keeping it that way. “Why would you burden me, a student in English literature, by wasting my time to learn programming?” I am often asked with passionate defiance.

Here is why. A few nights ago, a friend of mine spent hours manually filtering and copying data from an enormous, disorganized online database into an excel sheet to perform calculations. After watching his frustration grow exponentially with the number of rows in the sheet, I offered a slight intrusion: a 20-line VBA script that automated this exhaustive task. Upon seeing this in action, his eyes light lit up with fascination and intrigue. “Teach me!” he exclaimed.

 Now I watch my plumber install my water softener. It would have taken me twice as long if not longer. Comparative advantage at play, I can do something he cannot do. Same with that root canal. I did not shout when he turned the water back on, "teach me", I said "How much". The moral is that some things we have other people do, we cannot master everything.

The second element is learn to program "what" in "what". In 1962 I learned Fortran Assembly language. Moving registers back and forth on an IBM 704. Then Fortran, Cobol, Snobol, C, LISP, C, Pascal, and the list goes on. Do I program now, no, no need to, we outsource that. Are the principles important, perhaps, but even in 1962 I just picked up the first language. There were no classes, I ended up teaching the first class to lab students. So why force this on everyone since there is o one language, no one approach.

Most 8 year olds have picked up the facility to manipulate their iPad better than most adults. Perhaps it is better to let sleeping dog lie.