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I'm a biologist. When I was a teenager (in the 1980s), I learned to program, first in BASIC and then in FORTRAN. In the last 10 or 15 years I have written thousands of lines of code (mostly in Visual Basic) to analyze data and implement machine controls for my experiments. It's probably not the best code ever written, but it has been tremendously liberating to be able to get jobs done in exactly the way I want them done, without having to beg (and wait for) third-party software providers to provide solutions for me. Indeed, a scientist who can't program is not likely to be doing experiments on the cutting edge. When you're doing a really unique experiment, no one has been there before to provide tools for what needs to be done, so it's up to the scientist to write (or build) them him/herself.
Now I'm at the stage in my career where I teach younger scientists how to do research. And what I'm finding is that they overwhelmingly have no idea how to write even the simplest code. I've wondered why this is: aren't kids these days interested in programming, which was all the rage among the "smart kids" in high school in the 80s?
This article maybe provides some of the answer to this question. Computers were relatively new in the 80s, and people (inclduing kids) saw them as devices for... computing. In the 90s and 2000s, computers are devices for surfing the net and playing games. I think the author is right that a very simple and universal programming language such as BASIC should be included with every OS, and math and science textbooks should encourage kids to learn to solve problems with it. Of course not every kid will be interested in using such a tool. But maybe enough will so that I won't have to teach graduate students and post-docs (who have been going to school for up to 25 years) how to program.
