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Re: [Sheflug] Coding - the new Latin
On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Bob Mottram <fuzzgun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 11.01.2012 13:21, Richard Ibbotson wrote:
>>
>> The statistics on the numbers going to university to study computing
>> make sobering reading. In 2003 around 16,500 students applied to UCAS
>> for places on computer science courses. By 2007 that had fallen to
>> just 10,600, and although it's recovered a little to 13,600 last year,
>
>
>
> This may be a rational response to the changing employment prospects for
> software engineers over the last decade. Currently I only have numbers for
> the US economy, but if the UK is similar then employment levels for software
> engineers have either been stagnant or declining since 2000. This is
> probably partly due to technological unemployment, partly due to fashion and
> partly due to offshoring/deskilling.
Software Engineering was invented by NATO in response to the software
crisis of the 50s. This theory supposed that there are laws of
software that boffins can discover and disseminate to engineering
students who will work by obeying orders to code from superiors in a
hierarchy matching software composition. The number of Software
Engineers is therefore necessarily limited by the number of computer
science students.
And yes, the failure of Software Engineering to deliver[1] has made it
deeply unfashionable. Software creation has shifted over the last two
decades away from the engineering paradigm back to the humanist
Software Development paradigm rooted in logic, mathematics and
philosophy. And yes, anyone who failed to make this jump found their
work first de-skilled then outsourced and finally now that the work is
starting to be back-sourced to those who picked the right side. (2011
saw workers in the Philippines striking to stop jobs being
back-sourced to England.)
In terms of software development, there are massive skill shortages
within the ecosystem and high rates of pay inflation. I know of dozens
of unfilled vacancies for software developers in Leeds alone.
Thousands of opportunities in the software development ecosystem are
advertised every month. Not all are coding but being technical is
definite advantage.
But back to the original point: statistics about employment levels are
potentially misleading. The important question is whether a child
would benefit more from learning Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel,
or being exposed to logic (for those with mathematical aptitude) and
animation, computer art, hardware or coding.
For Microsoft, this is a defensive win (fewer pupils learning Office
but more potential coders with VB skills), a definite win for open
source (beyond VB ecosystem, stuff will be open), a moderate loss for
free software (overly dependent on frustrated Software Engineers with
C) and a moderate win for Linux (more people assembling their
computers and tinkering will lead to more Linux users). Free software
and linux may need to respond by allowing modern lightweight languages
(for example, JavaScript) into their world. We're start to see this
with eg. desktop CoachDB.
Robert
[1] Godel and Turin-Church have interesting implications for axiomatic
systems on Turin machines
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