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Read other letters about this article
I found Brin's essay to echo a complaint I've had for several years now.
I am a professor at one of the University of California campuses. I teach a range of subjects in biology and anthropology. When it comes to educating PhD students, I teach applied mathematics, statistics, and numerical methods to biologists and anthropologists. We get extremely bright PhD students, and they are very computer literate, but...
...very few of them can write a program that will even compute the average of a series of numbers. It's extremely frustrating. Each of them has spent many many hours in front of computers on their way to our PhD program, but very very little of it was spent building sets of instructions. Older scientists are often less computer saavy, but know more about programming.
This means more recent PhDs often actually know *less* about programming than previous generations do! If these students could write simple programs for their own use, they could save themselves countless hours of coding and recoding data. They could validate their statistical methods.
Look, specialization is largely good for society, and having software engineers do most of the programming these days is a reflection of specialization. It's similar to how automobile repair has become an increasingly specialized trade. But scientists often need very specialized programs. Waiting for software engineers to make some pretty pre-packaged environment will often not work for us. We have to take out our own trash. We have to fix our own fuel injector. Heck, we have to build our own fuel injectors.
It's gotten to the point that I ask first-year PhD students if they can program (most, "No") and require them to pass an exam on simple programming (in a language of their choice) before they can advance to candidacy. We make it work that way. But most universities just let their PhD students struggle on their own and probably never learn much about programming. This varies by discipline, of course, but programming is no less useful in ecology than it is in astro physics.
In my experience, the younger the students, the worse their knowledge of programming, on average. And it's damaging to the practice of science. It's certainly not Microsoft's responsibility to help us, but I'd sure appreciate it if they put BASIC on every install and made it a default desktop icon.
