Further rethinking how we teach people to code

Recently, I read a short article from Iris Meredith about rethinking how we teach programming. It's a pretty solid piece of work all around, and it has got me thinking how to further build on her ideas.

This contains a quick overview of her newsletter to get you up to speed, but I recommend reading it for yourself.

The Problem

As is rather obvious to most of us, the software industry is in a dire spot - Meredith summed it up better than I can:

Software engineers tend to be detached, demotivated and unwilling to care much about the work they're doing beyond their paycheck. Code quality is poor on the whole, made worse by the current spate of vibe coding and whatever other febrile ideas come out of Sam Altman's brain. Much of the software that we write is either useless or actively hurts people. And the talented, creative people that we most need in the industry are pushed to the margins of it.

As for the cause, Iris points to the "teach the mystic incantations" style used in many programming courses, which ignores teaching students how to see through an engineer’s eyes (so to speak), and teaching them the ethics of care necessary to write good code (roughly 90% of what goes into software engineering). As Iris notes:

This tends to lead, as you might expect, to a lot of new engineers being confused, demotivated and struggling to write good code or work effectively in a software environment. [...] It also means, in the end, that a lot of people who'd be brilliant software engineers just bounce off the field completely, and that a lot of people who find no joy in anything and just want a big salary wind up in the field, never realising that they have no liking or aptitude for it.

Meredith’s Idea

Meredith’s solution, in brief, is threefold.

First, she recommends starting people off with HTML as their first language, giving students the tools they need to make something they want and care about (a personal website in this case), and providing a solid bedrock for learning fundamental programming skills

Second, she recommends using “static site generators with templating engines” as an intermediate step between HTML/CSS and full-blown programming, to provide students an intuitive method of understanding basic concepts such as loops, conditionals, data structures and variables.

(As another awful member points out, they provide an easy introduction to performance considerations/profiling by being blazing fast compared to all-too common JS monoliths online, and provide a good starting point for introducing modularity as well.)

Third, and finally, she recommends having students publish their work online right from the start, to give them reason to care about their work as early as possible and give them the earliest possible opportunity to learn about the software development life cycle.

A Complementary Idea

[basic idea: teach art alongside coding, to flex students’ creative muscles]

Meredith’s suggested approach to software education is pretty solid on all fronts - it gets students invested in their programming work, and gives them the tools needed to make and maintain high-quality code.

If I were to expand on this a bit, I think the obvious addition would be to provide an arts education to complement Iris’ proposed webdev-based approach

As explicit means of self-expression, the arts provide provide great assistance in highlighting the expressive elements of software Meredith wishes to highlight

An arts education would wonderfully complement the expressive elements of software Meredith wishes to highlight - focusing on webdev, developing students’ art skills would expand their ability to customise their websites to their liking, letting them make something truly unique to themselves.

The skills that students learn through the arts would also complement what they directly learn in programming, too. The critical eye that art critique grants them will come in handy for code review. The creative muscles they build through art will enhance their problem-solving abilities, and so on.

Beyond that, I expect the complementary arts will do a good job attracting creatives to the field, whilst pushing away “people who find no joy in anything and just want a big salary”, which Meredith notes are common in the field. Historically, “learn to code” types have viewed the arts as a “useless” degree, so they’ll near-certainly turn their noses up at having to learn it alongside something more “useful”, leaving the door open for more creatives to join up.

A More Outlandish Idea

For a more outlandish idea, the long-defunct, yet well-beloved multimedia platform Adobe Flash could provide surprisingly useful for a programming education, especially with the complementary arts education I suggested before.

Being effectively an IDE and an animation program combined into one, Flash offers a means of developing and testing a student’s skills in art and programming simultaneously, and provides an easy showcase of how the two can complement each other.

Deploying Flash to a personal website wouldn’t be hard for students either, as the Ruffle emulator allows Flash content to play without having to install Flash player. (Rather helpful, given most platforms don’t accept Flash content these days :P)