Have To Vs. Get To

Some years ago my father, a Methodist minister, was talking to a Catholic priest friend of his. My Dad said “You have to say Mass every day?” The priest replied “No, I get to say Mass every day.” For the priest, quite reasonably, saying Mass was an honor, a privilege, something he felt lucky to be able to do. And my Dad always felt the same way about his work as well but there is something powerful in the way the idea is expressed. I thought of this story recently when I read a blog post by Eugene Wallingford that read:

My part of these conversations can be summed up in a mantra I now keep close to my heart:

         You don't have to program; you get to program.

We need to do something to change the default expectation young people have about programming. Seriously.

It’s a matter of perspective in some ways. These days our students don’t understand what a privilege it is to be able to program a computer. It wasn’t that long ago when computers were locked in environmentally controlled rooms where access was jealously guarded as if to some holy shrine available only to a select priesthood. But it is more than just access – it is power!

Being able to program is the ability to get a powerful, fast machine to do work for you. To solve problems for you. To be less dependent on other people, canned programs, or tools created and controlled by others. Being able to program is to be more in control of your own destiny. If you run into a problem that requires programming you can do it yourself!

OK perhaps I’m getting a little carried away. But like Prof. Wallingford says we have to communicate different default expectations about programming. It is a good thing not a bad thing. It is a fun thing not a frustrating thing. (Well on balance and if you do it right. :-) ) Perhaps it is in the way we present it. Perhaps it is in the problems we assign. Perhaps it is something the media is messing up for us and we need to work harder on our own to fix. But we really do need to express the joy of programming to our students.

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• Anonymous
  August 05, 2009
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