Recommended Listening: Software Carpentry (great concept, poor name.)
Greg Wilson talks about teaching condensed coding wisdom in this episode (53min) of Jon Udell’s Interviews With Innovators. He has for many years run a stand-alone course for university scientists summarizing important software concepts. Wilson is very pragmatic about both the value and the difficulties of having some kind of computational thinking taught throughout education.
It is software carpentry as a limited subset of subset engineering - “About putting an extension on the house, rather than building the Channel Tunnel.” I hate this term; I greatly dislike the engineering metaphor, and carpentry also triggers the differently valuable software craft metaphor for me.
Toward the end they discuss how outdated some of the key concepts in the course have already become (Wilson is hoping to work on a new version) given the rise of networks and agile. I was reminded of a recent conversation with an ex-colleague on which abstractions and worthy books on coding survive such changes.
