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Hmmmmm... punchcards... stacks of 'em.

Yes, I guess I am that old.

DD enjoyed Codeacademy, btw-- I will also add that the offerings there are a bit limited, but it's definitely worth the time to invest.

I believe that may be how DD learned PYTHON-- or maybe it was something else.

LOL.. I'm on the cusp. My brother who was 2 years older than me took his first programming class in Fortran his freshman year of H.S. on a mainframe using punch cards.

Two years later when I was a freshman the school had a classroom full off Apple 2's (one of the first schools with 'home' computers) and all freshman took a one a week class where we were being taught a bit of Basic by the old typing teacher. Two classmates & I who could have taught the class better than the teacher, were allowed to goof off (work on independent projects) together in the back of class.

They still call a batch control file a "job card" in the mainframe world today, long after it stopped being a punched card (or giant stack thereof).

Yeah, I was thinking about that when I posted-- the term "stack" is also still very much embedded in the jargon of the industry (and beyond). Probably most people under 40 don't realize that it refers to punched cards.

Fun fact: for years and years, I was with an auto insurance company that used punched cards for billing-- until about 1990, when they upgraded their servers. I was forever charmed to get my billing statement with a detached punched card to return with my payment, and a bit wistful when they finally went modern.

Programming has become more convenient and fun, but I wonder if a much higher fraction of entering college freshmen has done any programming today vs. 30 years ago. I don't know of any colleges that require a programming background. Looking at MIT's What To Do In High School I see the following recommendations:
There is nothing about programming, but having never programmed would likely cause more challenges in passing MIT classses than not having taken a foreign language, as illustrated by a MIT student blog post I linked to earlier http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....st_programming_languages.html#Post220423 .

I think the only reason they taught everyone programming at High School when I was a freshman was because they were gifted with these computers and they needed to show they were doing somthing with them. Thye KNEW they would be important for every kid to gain computer skills but they wasn't much else to do with them but learn how to program at that time. The class was only 3 times a month taken out of a students math class. It really only gave most students a taste of what programming was like.

I do agree more students should know some programming. Not sure where you fit it in the schedule.

I had a H.S. principal (not for my son's school) last year tell me that he thought the emphasis on foreign languages was misplaced in college requirements. When I called him on it he said that he did agree learning another language was important but that 2-3 year of H.S. classes didn't teach you fluency and that there were many more important skills students could learn in H.S. That a lot of students were missing out on other important and useful H.S. coursework because of the college language requirement.

I have to agree with him, bluemagic. I can't say that my 2+ years of high school programming were any kind of waste of time, even if I did develop such an aversion to the subject after a brush with machine language that I never truly recovered my love of coding...

it's still the case that I used that information more over the next 30 years than anything else that I learned in that building. Well, maybe old-school Personal Finance, which was (at the time) a state requirement. Wisely so, IME.

I also took 3 years of high school French, and several years of college German, and neither thing did much to make me fluent by any stretch of the imagination.

On the other hand, a few weeks on the ground with Quebecoise or Parisians surrounding me does wonders.


My DD has found a lot more use for her HTML than she has for her Greman, that's for sure-- and she's got that linguist gene that I lack, so her fluency is pretty great given her level of exposure. She also picked up French at a rate that was flatly kind of astonishing once she landed in an immersion setting-- with no instruction at all.

When I first started in IT we used to call them a deck of cards just like playing cards. With a serious batch stream you learned to draw or score a diagonal line across the top in case you dropped the deck and scattered them everywhere LOL. For a while afterwards we used to refer to the files holding JCL as decks too.

Personally, I've found my foreign language requirement did a wonderful job of teaching me English. Much like a fish doesn't know it's wet, an English speaker doesn't know he's conjugating commonly used irregular verbs (to be, to have) until he tries it in a foreign tongue.

And when you look at languages from the outside, you start to notice their quirks, which can be revealing about the history and culture of their speakers.