A little bit of computing goes a long way, and not everyone needs software engineering: The SIGCSE 50th Anniversary issue of ACM Inroads

This year is the 50th SIGCSE Technical Symposium, and Jane Prey was guest editor for a special issue of ACM Inroads on 50 years of ACM SIGCSE. You can see the current issue here, but yes, it’s behind a paywall — ACM Inroads is meant to be a membership benefit.

I’m really fascinated by this issue. Sally Fincher does a nice job telling the story of ICER. I enjoyed Susan Rodgers’ and Valerie Barr’s reflections. I’m still trying to understand all of Zach Dodds’ references in his SIGCSE 2065 future-retrospective. I found some of the articles frustrating and disagreed with some of the claims (e.g., I don’t think it’s true that AP CS enrollments plummeted after introducing Java), but discussion can be good for the community.

I was asked to write a piece about What we care about now, and what we’ll care about in the future. My bottom line is a claim that John Maloney (of Squeak, Scratch, and GP fame) reminded me is a favorite phrase of the great Logo (and many other things) designer, Brian Silverman: A little bit of computing goes a long way.

The important part of Scratch is that computationalists find value in it, i.e., that they can make something that they care about in Scratch. What we see in Scratch is the same process we see among the computationalists in computational photography, journalism, and science. They don’t need all of computer science. They can find value and make something useful with just some parts of computing. Scratch projects smell wonderful to Scratch computationalists.

There’s been a thread on Twitter recently about the use of software engineering principles to critique Scratch projects (see the thread starting here). Researchers in software engineering claim that Scratch code “smells,” e.g., has bad practices associated with it. There’s even a website that will analyze your Scratch project in terms of these software engineering practices, DrScratch.  The website claims that it is measuring computational thinking skills — I see no evidence of that at all.

These software engineering researchers are misunderstanding users and genres of programming. They ought to read Turkle and Papert’s Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete. People code for different purposes, with different ways of appropriating code. The standards of the software engineer are not appropriate to apply to children. Not everybody is going to be a professional software developer, and they don’t need to be.

Increasingly, people are only going to use parts of computer science, and they will achieve fluency in those. That’s a wonderful and powerful thing. A little bit of computing goes a long way.