[ubuntu-uk] (Marketing) Royal Society asks you - why IT is boring?

[Craig Peden]

As a student in Scotland currently studying Computing, I can safely
say that computing is well subscribed to up here. However, for
personally there are some turn offs. When I am older I would like to
be a programmer, but we are taught visual basic. I realise that it is
an easy language but I want to learn something actually worthwhile.
Also, the exam board's definitions of some things are out of date. For
example, it states a web server allows a user to access the Internet.
Whereas now I believe it is a server that hosts files for Internet
users. I would say their definition is a proxy server. This sense that
what I am learning will be of little use to me in the actual industry
of computing is a bit of a downer after watching this releases' UDS.

I still make small programs for the fun of it :)

- Craig

On 26 Aug 2010, at 07:16, Sean Miller <sean at seanmiller.net> wrote:

> Personally, I think that half the reason people find computers boring
> these days is that there isn't the "mystique" about them that there
> was when I was growing up (the 80s)... you had a BBC Micro, your mate
> had a Commodore 64... you argued about which was the better computer
> and you programmed small apps "just to prove you could"... you bought
> magazines with pages of code to type in to make a little cursor go
> along the bottom of the screen with strange pixellated things at top
> that were supposedly aliens... which, of course, would normally crash
> somewhere along the way  "Syntax error at line 34"... ah, the joy!!
>
> Now computers are "out of the box", I don't think people "have the
> fire" for programming them - they're more interested in just using
> them...  - becoming a computer programmer is no more exciting (to your
> average teenager) than becoming a TV engineer or a washing-machine
> repairer...
>
> To make "IT interesting again" you would have to make "being a
> programmer something special" again... and it's not, really,
> anymore...
>
> Sean
>
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