Writing "code"?

My friend from freshman year, Elliot, has recently started a new blog, Anyone Can Code. I guess he's going to teach some programming courses over the summer, partly because he, like me, doesn't like the way most of the courses he's taken at USC have been taught. And because he believes that, well, anyone can code.

His first post on the Anyone Can Code blog lamented the people who are somewhat interested in computer science, but think they can't code. I've always thought that "people who can't do math" were just people who had terrible math teachers and never took them time to learn any math on their own. There isn't really anything wrong with this, but it's now become relatively socially acceptable to know almost no math. It's also socially acceptable to know literally no coding, since most people never take any computer science classes.

I've digressed a little, but the point I wanted to make here is that perhaps referring to programming as "coding" is not good for making it accessible to the general public. Code, in everyday language, is a message which is unreadable until a person or machine performs some kind of operation on it to decode it, so that humans can read it. Back in the days of punchcards, that may have been somewhat accurate, but now writing computer programs is (or at least should be) almost the opposite. You write down what you want the computer to do, in as clear and straightforward a way as possible. Then the computer compiles or interprets it, which is when it becomes completely unreadable. But the programmer isn't writing "code". They're just writing down a set of instructions, in another language. So maybe instead of "coding," we should look at programming as writing in another language. Because that's all programming languages are--they're just languages, where the rules of grammar must be followed much more strictly than in languages like English or Spanish.

Oh great, you say, so coding is just like learning a language, except with even more emphasis on grammar? Sounds lovely. Well yes, but there's very little emphasis on learning new vocabulary. In fact, most of the important words in most languages are actually words you already know. And the grammar rules are much clearer and completely unambiguous, especially in languages like Ruby and (from what I hear, although I haven't used it myself) Python, which were deliberately intended to be easier to use. I think Elliot is right that anyone can code. It doesn't mean everyone will find it fun. But if we stop thinking of code as "code," perhaps everyone will be able to do it.

One Small Step, II

That last post was getting a little long, so I'm splitting it into two parts. I was talking about how curiosity and a sense of wonder is a very good thing to have. My next example was going to be this clip, from The View, that I keep thinking about.

If you can't watch it, this is the part that really kind of scares me:

Whoopi: Is the world flat?
Sherri: Is the world flat? I don't know.
W: What do you think?
S: I never thought about it, Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it.

For me, it's almost worse that she said "I've never thought about it," rather than "Yes, I believe it is flat." She is ignorant of something, and ignorance can be fixed. Granted, this is an extreme example of "ignorance," but if she were willing to listen, someone could explain to her about gravity and spheres and such. But, like Seven of Nine in the Voyager episode I was talking about, she is only interested in completing her mission, exactly as stated, (in this case, raising a child) and has no desire to learn anything along the way that seems "irrelevant." This is worse than ignorance, a lack of knowledge; this is a lack of curiosity.

When I went to find the video I came across a clip from The View, a day or two later, when they gave Sherri a chance to defend herself after she was being mocked all over youtube and elsewhere. Fast forward to about halfway through:



Sherri claims it was a "little hard for her because she never had to defend her religious beliefs in public." They were talking about God and evolution before, but then she seems to imply that not knowing whether the earth is flat is a religious belief. Anyway, her new position demonstrates another point I was making: Science is extremely scary for many people.

Sherri: You asked, Whoopi, did I know if the earth was round or flat, and Barbara asked if I knew if the earth was round or flat, and I was so nervous, all I heard was, "How many triglycerides does it take to make Pluto when the Robitussin comes, and the earth..." So when they asked me, I was like "I don't know!"

She sounded very clear-headed on the first clip, so I don't know how many people will be satisfied with this explanation. In any case, this is the question I really want to ask:

Is there a word for a lack of curiosity, in the way that "ignorance" refers to a lack of knowledge? If not, what should the word be?