I can’t quite bring myself to put DeWitt on the blogroll, considering that she’s posted only one item in the past two years . . . but I happened to notice this new post, where she writes:
In the Middle Ages learning, and even literacy, were not considered necessary acquirements for a great lord. The qualities expected of him were bravery, dash, a certain magnificence and easiness of style, perhaps the practical sense of a man of the world, but not learning. Such men set the pace for lesser landowners, and their style tended to be imitated even by those who had made money as lawyers, merchants, or sheep farmers. . . .
We’re now at a stage, I think, where programming occupies a place similar to that of literacy in mediaeval England. It is necessary both for government and for business at all but the smallest level, but it is not a skill whose lack would be shameful in anyone with pretensions to social standing. On the contrary, it is associated with qualities of character that carry no prestige, are even socially stigmatised (we may think of the way Mark Zuckerberg is presented in The Social Network). One can get a lot of mileage out of deploring grammatical ignorance, especially in public figures; one can get a lot of mileage out of ranting over deprecated punctuation; one wouldn’t get very far deploring ignorance of the difference between a number and a string, haphazard use of white space or of capitalisation in the naming of functions and variables. . . .
Hmmmm, I don’t know about that. That seems like an extreme claim. On the other hand, maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way. My reaction was that programming is important, but not soooo important for people to live their lives. But I guess that this was the case for literacy in mediaeval England: knowing how to read didn’t get you much?
I find the whole thing some combination of wrong, unsupported, and unintelligible. I’ll accept that literacy was not necessary for the Lords in the Middle Ages (I actually have no idea, but I’ll accept that as a given). But she appears to say that literacy is necessary for leaders today (“one can get a log of mileage….”). Given we have had a number of presidents that stretch grammar (think “nucular” or almost anything our current President says), I don’t buy that such things are necessary for leaders today. Regarding programming, I’m not sure I see the parallel with literacy in the Middle Ages, but her statements about programming don’t seem right to me. Sure, geeks who can program are thought to lack some social skills, but it isn’t clear to me whether that is a negative or positive trait. It might be correct that critiquing leaders for their lack of programming skills won’t get you much – but I think that is because so much of the public lacks such skills. Then there is the matter of whether or how programming skills are necessary today for “business at all but the smallest level.” I don’t agree with that at all. It isn’t even clear what she means by programming skills – is it a particular programming language, the ability to know at least one programming language, or the more abstract ability to think about structured inquiry? How many jobs beyond “the smallest level” actually require programming?
If we move on to the things that you can rant about these days: I don’t think it is punctuation, literacy, grammar, or programming. A few weeks ago when a US Senator cited a number orders of magnitude incorrectly (and repeatedly used that number as evidence of massive waste, fraud, and abuse, without being corrected by the Secretary of Education), such quantitative illiteracy did not even seem to result in successful ranting. On the other hand, I guess you can rant over anything negative that is said in opposition to any of the Executive Orders and get a fair amount of mileage out of that.
Somehow I seem to have missed the entire point of her claims. None of it resonates with me at all.
Dale:
DeWitt writes: “We’re now at a stage, I think, where programming occupies a place similar to that of literacy in mediaeval England. It is necessary both for government and for business at all but the smallest level, but it is not a skill whose lack would be shameful in anyone with pretensions to social standing.”
I don’t think she’s making the claim that literacy is required for government or business success, she’s just saying that, at the very least, government and business leaders like to pretend they are literate. Consider the common trope where a politician or business executive or celebrity is asked to name their favorite books. It’s not usually considered a good answer to say, “I don’t really know how to read.” Being functionally illiterate is considered embarrassing.
Regarding innumeracy, yes, that’s a problem at all levels, as we discussed here, for example. Then again, prominent science celebrities can be innumerate, too.
There’s quite a gap between even the US president’s literacy level and being illiterate. He can write quite a creative birthday card.
Michael:
That was a few years ago. He might not be able to do that anymore. 25 years ago I wrote a scientific paper in Dutch. No way I could do that now.
It’s probably important to be ‘in the argument’ with which she is engaging – the claim that ‘everybody’ must be a programmer to advance in social standing and take an important role in society; that it should join reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic. And apparently that Greek, Latin, the Gospels and Psalter are not as important as they once were. I’ve met some prestigious, seemingly well-educated scholars from other countries who didn’t understand DNA and RNA – shocking, I tell you, to not believe wholly in the central dogma – and this fits in with similar claims about how universal biology, chemistry, and geology education ‘should be.’ In the end, these are rival claims about status and status anxiety. I think she’s right, programming will not be ‘that important’ to the elites, and the disciplines it demands tend to be orthogonal to certain social skills, valorized by competing hierarchies.
I had to look up the term “Psalter” and so you do not have to:
“A psalter is a book containing the Book of Psalms, often with other devotional material.”
I am impressed that the term is is assumed to be common knowledge to contributors to this blog.
I got hung up on the spelling and then I thought it was a pun–“mediaeval” instead of “medieval.” Turns out, either spelling is acceptable
https://www.medievalists.net/2024/01/medieval-mediaeval/
“A quick Google search reveals that the word ‘mediaeval’ can be found over six million times on the Internet. This sounds impressive until you look up the word ‘medieval’ and find more than one hundred million references. Why do we have these two spellings, and why has medieval become more popular?”
I recommend the entire article to see the shifting preferences as time marches on.
This would be like spellings of words such as orthopaedics vs orthopedics, encyclopedia vs encyclopaedia, etc etc. Mediaeval would be the more ‘latin’esque of the 2 spellings given, IIRC, it comes from the latin _medium aevum_ . The evolution of latin derivatives has often been characterized by dropping characters that offer no value for pronouncing the word (in this case, usually dropping the ‘a’). This feels the typical linguistic evolutionary route: hard sounds softening, truncation of characters, deprecation of words. This last one is a bit irksome to me wrt to English as there are words that are perfectly descriptive and not vague, but we’ve dropped them for ‘simpler’ words that require more context to have meaning.
A bit of diversion: many people today would have a very difficult time reading, well, anything from Jane Austen. And there are arguments about her writing as either ‘beautifully descriptive’ or ‘pompous’ and ‘overly complex’. How I think she employs the vocabulary she uses is quite specific, uncompromising, and add color (and plenty of snark) to her works. However the English language has changed quite a bit since then (skibidee in ohio?). I’ve heard Austen’s usage classified by English/language academics as something of a ‘high language’, using more _complex morphologies_ in words to convey meaning. I don’t know if that’s more of an ‘eyy back in the olde days people spoke better’ kind of assessment or if the English language in fact used to be ‘higher’ or ‘more specific’ in its vocabulary.
I’m inclined to agree, at least to an extent, with the argument that literacy isn’t a requirement for public figures/leaders – although the facade of it, to differentiate the ‘Lord’ from the ‘naive’ at least on the surface. This seems to be a recurrent theme. One thing I have read however is that, roughly in the 1800s, the proportion of those as functionally illiterate in English was about 0.4% whereas now we have what, an estimated ~20% functional illiteracy today? Naturally the first number doesn’t feel believable, and something I read, strengthening (rightly or wrongly) my suspicion, that this particular statistic came from polling only white men. Imagine that.
Just a bit of my own bias here – I grew up with the 2 volume Britannica World Dictionary from (I think) the 1930s. Terribly interesting words that are specific and meaningful enough to make me wonder why we dropped them. I’m not a linguist, so someone else more knowledgeable should be able to chime in here.
As far as programming. Yeah, I’m a bit confused on this piece. But I do believe she’s conveying that, while programming literacy doesn’t carry any social importance either, the facade of a leader ‘being able to code’ **might** present such a person as more technically or intellectually competent (maybe). I have some thoughts on this as ‘programming’ has taken on quite a bit of semantic change in recent years.
I think Andrew’s quip about innumeracy has a similar character, especially if we think about maths/stats as a language that expresses our thoughts about various phenomena more concretely than a bunch of hand waving or cutting notches in sticks. However, a hand waver in an influential position who can ‘talk the talk’ (faking it to make it – whether or not they **understand** the sound bytes they might utter), might be seen in a more favorable light I suppose. That is until someone actually calls out the shill.
Jane Austen? Are you sure you aren’t thinking of someone else? It’s true that Austen’s writing doesn’t quite read like it’s from the present era, but it’s hard to picture someone who reads at or above, I dunno, maybe 12th grade level would struggle to understand it. People might think it’s boring (I don’t), but that’s another matter.
Here’s a fairly typical bit of her writing (from Sense and Sensibility): “When he was present she had no eyes for anyone else. Everything he did was right. Everything he said was clever. If their evenings at the park were concluded with cards, he cheated himself and all the rest of the party to get her a good hand. If dancing formed the amusement of the night, they were partners for half the time; and when obliged to separate for a couple of dances, were careful to stand together and scarcely spoke a word to anyone else. Such conduct made them, of course, most exceedingly laughed at; but ridicule could not shame and seemed hardly to provoke them.”
And here’s another: “The dinner was a grand one, the servants were numerous, and everything bespoke the mistress’s inclination for show and the master’s ability to support it….no poverty of any kind, except of conversation, appeared, but there the deficiency was considerable. John Dashwood had not much to say for himself that was worth hearing, and his wife had still less. But there was no peculiar disgrace in this, for it was very much the case with the chief of their visitors, who almost all laboured under one or other of these disqualifications for being agreeable: want of sense, either natural or improved; want of elegance, want of spirits, or want of temper.”
I disagree strongly. The reaction to Trump is one of the best proofs of what she says about social significance – among a certain class. Trump is perfectly literate, in the sense that he can read and write the written word. But he denigrates the values of the professional wordsmith class, and they return his loathing in full. It’s just fascinating to me, how they go completely over-the-top frothing with anger at him over this (exaggerated for humor): “You made a typo! SHAME SHAME SHAME! There’s a grammatical error in that sentence, YOU DUMMY!! Capitalization mistakes, MORON!!! Oh, how dare someone who is so disrespectful of our taboos have such political power, the end of civilization is nigh”.
It’s part of Trump’s appeal – that professional class is almost by definition running the media, yet it’s a very small percentage of the electorate. And it convinces a good part of that electorate that Trump’s their guy.
However, as a programmer myself, I don’t believe what she’s saying is true about programming, quite the opposite. Nobody in power needs to know about programming, it’s a tradesman craft. Buildings need plumbing, but you don’t need to be aware of how it works, or even how to unclog a sink.
Oops, that was supposed to be attached to Dale Lehman’s comment above.
Moron!
I keep reading your comment and find I agree, but I can’t understand how it relates to “what she says about social significance.” What does she say about social significance? From your comment, I will agree that literacy (defined by correct spelling, grammar, etc.) is not required for people in power (e.g. Trump). Basic literacy (ability to read and write) may be necessary, but certainly is a very low bar by itself. I also agree that programming is not required by people in power. So, I’m still missing her point: how is programming similar to literacy in the Middle Ages? The idea that neither is required for people in power? If that is what she is saying, then I find it a fairly worthless observation. Much more interesting would be what “is” required for people in power? My guess would be that it is wealth and influence (though that may be somewhat circular reasoning). And we certainly know that quantitative literacy is not required – in fact, it is probably counterproductive.
I read her as arguing that programming now is akin to the role of reading/writing in the medieval era – considered a niche skill (mostly for weirdos) at the time, but in the future it will be regarded as fundamental to being a functional member of society. And people who are less than skilled at its nuances, will lose status among elites for their failings at it. I believe she’s projecting from attitudes now of the relatively very small group of good writers, who of course think the ability to write good is the mark of a good person. But programmers aren’t ever going to have the same sort of cultural media power that Being A Writer holds, in my view because a programming is fundamentally a technical trade – closer to plumbing or carpentry than, e.g. writing Op-Ed pieces for news organizations.
Undoubtedly, we all agree that some errors are worse than others. But, which ones? Dividing by zero, a programming loop which never ends, supposed bagels which have never been in boiling water first, the incessant use of the word, “like”?
On the other hand, what constitutes an innocent error, something to be forgiven because it is geographically ambiguous, such as the check-mark, ✔, which, depending on U.S. geography, can mean either “correct” (east coast) or “incorrect” (upper midwest)?
Wait–there are supposed bagels which have never been in boiling water first? Whassup with that??
Consider thynself lucky: there’s nothing that’s even a distant approximation to a bagel anywhere in Japan.
Speaking of Japan and statistics, I climbed Mt. Fuji in 1979. By then it was already insanely crowded and has only gotten worse. (As a climb, it’s an ugly cinder pile (and will trash your climbing shoes something fierce), but the caldera at the top is seriously neat.)
This year, they got fed up, and started charging 4000 Yen (US$28 or so).
Last year, 6 folks died on Mt. Fuji, this year zero. (From memory, but correct)
Last year 63 folks needed rescuing (being carried off the mountain), this year, only 36. (From memory, but close)
Economics sometimes works. YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
David:
That’s ok, there are no good bagels in Paris either. That just gives me something to look forward to when I return to New York (or on the rare occasions that I’m in a Canadian city).
Andrew has lead a sheltered life. Bagel-shaped ersatz bagels are everywhere in the U.S. of A. Sad to say, they have never seen boiling water. Just as sad, said toroidal objects come in a tight plastic bag, killing everything.
An interesting side issue: Given the government crackdown on demonstrations at universities, is criticizing the definition of what constitutes a bagel, grounds for punishment?
It’s not every day you hear New Yorker’s complaining about non New York food.
Considering she wrote this in 2012/2013, I think what she said sounded less controversial back then. There was a big push for kids to know programming iirc, I did learn to program around that period, so maybe my news sources were more biased towards programming.