Irreal

Chris Wellons over at Null Program has an interesting post on High School students and how they lack a couple of basic computer skills that hamper their advancement in the subject. Wellons mentors students so he’s seen these problems first hand.

The first problem is that they have no notion of how files are stored or of file paths. That’s not too surprising given that devices like smart phones and tablets hide the notion of file and concentrate on the concept of application data instead.

It’s the second problem that resonated with me: students don’t know how to touch type. If you’re going to be a developer, this is a skill that can make a huge difference. It’s surprising how many “IT professionals” don’t touch type.

Back in the antediluvian days, High Schools offered a course called “Personal Typing.” It taught you enough basics to get you touch typing even if you weren’t up to secretarial speed standards. I don’t know if such courses are still offered but I wouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t. If you’re going to use up your electives on computer courses, you probably won’t have time for personal typing. Still, it seems worthwhile to me.

In these days when typing is rapidly replacing handwriting as a way of recording our thoughts, it seems to me that you’d want to be as efficient at it as possible. It’s fine to say—as I often have—that there’s no need to teach cursive handwriting because it’s mostly been replaced by typing but if you’re going to make that claim you should at least teach kids to be good at it.

There’s a nice interview with Richard Stallman in the latest issue of The New Left Review. NLR is, of course, a left leaning publication in the Marxist tradition but don’t let that put you off. Mostly, the discussion of politics is limited to Stallman’s, which are well known to everyone familiar with RMS and his writings.

The discussion begins with RMS’ early life and how he got interested in computers. In those days, getting access to a computer was a lot harder than simply buying a PC. He moves on to his time at the MIT AI Lab and Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). I enjoyed his stories of how every hacker there refused to be pushed around by the administrators and insisted on running the machine and setting policies for its use on their own. That didn’t sit well with the suits, of course, and when they finally succeeded in implementing passwords for the LCS, machines Stallman quit working for LCS and devoted all his time to the AI Lab.

The interviewer tries to draw Stallman out on how it felt to be funded by the government that was bombing Vietnam but Stallman refused to take the bait. He said he, like everybody else at the Lab, was against the war but their work had no military applications and they didn’t worry about it.

The rest of the interview explores Stallman’s feelings about Free Software and what the FSF hopes to accomplish. Most of this will be familiar to Irreal readers but is still interesting.

The interview is a bit longer than usual but interesting and worth the time.