More than ever before in history, business needs people who can program. Software is becoming a large part of ordinary life, so much so that entire industries and job descriptions are being supplanted by code. Or, as a Netscape founder put it, "software is eating the world". But there is a problem with our ever increasing reliance on software: a shortage of people who can write it.
Learning to program is "notoriously difficult", noted Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat from the School of Computing at Middlesex University, in a famous 2006 paper of theirs, "The Camel Has Two Humps".
"A substantial minority of students fails in every introductory programming course in every UK university. Despite heroic academic effort, the proportion has increased rather than decreased over the years. Despite a great deal of research into teaching methods and student responses, we have no idea of the cause."
This austere requirement has been known for as long as there have been programs and programmers to write them.
"Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it," wrote Fred Brooks in his classic book on systems software development, "The Mythical Man Month". For complete post see here
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