...comes from former Vice-President and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden, who told a crowd in Derry, New Hampshire, yesterday:
“Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well...Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
With all due respect, sir, I disagree. The aptitudes are completely different.
It's rather like saying, "Anybody who can drive a car can learn to be a nuclear physicist."
"Anybody who can bake a chocolate cake can learn how to design a municipal waste treatment facility."
"Anybody who can put one foot in front of the other can conduct a great symphony orchestra."
In each instance, including Vice-President Biden's, the first skill does not preclude the second, granted, but neither is it a guarantee of achieving it.
Plus, anybody includes a lot ot people.
You heard it here first.
Color me skeptical.
As someone who can program and once taught it, I suspect that Mr Biden can't and probably couldn't learn it either. But he's not the only politician to say ridiculous things.
ReplyDeleteI came to the conclusion that saying stupid things is a prerequisite for a pastime in politics.
DeleteTasker, I became a programmer in 1962 while I was in the U.S. Air Force and was hired by IBM in 1965. I retired from all that in 2000 and am probably woefully out-of-date with what is going on nowadays. I suspect your suspicions about Mr. Biden are correct.
DeleteAdrian, unfortunately for us, many make politics their full-time job.
DeleteSceptical is a colour you wear well, and a much more flattering one than gullible.
ReplyDeleteSue, thank you (I think).
DeleteI agree with you!
ReplyDeleteI think we all have different aptitudes, and mine is definitely not programming.
Biden and Trump's aptitude isn't common sense either.
Kathy, the inmates are running the asylum regardless which party is in power.
DeleteIt's simple. Biden is wrong. I did basic programming in Cobol and Fortran as a subsid in post-grad. I have two degrees and also read for the English Bar (but left for Scotland before I completed). I also read books on logic. I am not stupid. I'm pretty good practically as well. I have restored the occasional car and built a kitchen and a pottery doing all the plumbing, electrics and joinery. This is not a boast it is just a categorical refutation of Biden's remark because I am completely unable to grasp one of the basics needed for everything ie binary arithmetic. My brain just won't work that way. I can just about manage some basic HTML and that's about as far as I can get.
ReplyDeleteGraham, besides decimal I am fluent in binary, octal, and hexadecimal. Octal (base 8) and hexadecimal (base 16) are just shorthand ways of writing binary, which is murder. Octal works well with 6-bit byte computers (think IBM 7090) and hexadecimal works well with 8-bit byte computers (think IBM 360, which also introduced us to half-words (16 bytes), words (32 bytes) and double words (64 bytes). Is your head swimming yet?
DeleteYES!
DeletePS Tasker, I prostrate myself before you. Respect. My elder son died just as he completed his doctorate in computer programming. I helped him set up his first Sinclair Spectrum ZX when he was at primary school. Before long he was trying to teach me how to program in Basic. He gave up.
ReplyDeleteGraham, assembler languages can be tough, but compiler languages can be almost like English. Yeah, right.
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