What is programming-as-literacy, what does it look like, and what should we worry about? Alan Kay in Scientific American

Last month, I wrote a blog post about programming as a kind of literacy. I got some pushback.  Really? Literacy?  That programming in C stuff?  Well, no, programming in C is not what I mean by a form of literacy.  I recommended looking at some of what Alan Kay had written in Scientific American.

I decided to do that for myself.

Alan’s first article for Scientific American was in 1977, “Microelectronics and the Personal Computer,”  about the idea of a personal computer and the explorations they were doing at Xerox PARC with Smalltalk. I liked this one a lot because it emphasizes simulations “the central property of computing.”

The second was in 1984, “Computer Software.” Here’s where he defines literacy with the computer. It’s way more than just programming.

The third was in 1991, “Computers, Networks and Education.” This is the one where Alan really questioned whether things with computing were going in the right direction. For example, he worried about how people thought about “literacy” on the computer.

He returned to the importance of simulation.

And he was worried about people being critical of information that they find on the Internet (note that this is 1991, before Web browsers).

But in the end, Alan was hopeful, that we might develop a skeptical attitude with computing.