Programming as a Basic Skill

Too many people lack even basic programming skills:

• Politicians try unsuccessfully to reason about how their actions will affect complex systems
• Lawyers can't write clearly while being clearly understood
• Doctors can't communicate their intuitions about medical conditions
• Scientists make grave errors in their statistics
  
• Teachers can't communicate their knowledge to students
• and everyone commits logical fallacies regularly

People need to learn how to:

• communicate their ideas clearly, and
  
• interpret and influence interconnected behaviors that they can't manipulate directly

These are basic skills, perhaps more basic than arithmetic.

A computer's logic is impeccable, yet it can access, store, and manipulate vast quantities of information. So instructing a computer (classically called programming) is ideal for teaching these concepts.

But not today.

Next: Problems with Programming (Big-Picture)