Coding for coal miners? Unlikely
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Coding is hard. Bloomberg can’t do it, nor can Joe, “we’ll teach coal miners to code” Biden. Excellent article on the subject here.
[Biden]: “Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
It’s true that some Americans can quickly learn the rudiments of some high-level programming language, like COBOL, and then write a program to do some low-level task, like spit out some dinky report. But becoming a dependable programmer involves much more than knowing a programming language. This will be driven home when you get a 3 AM call to leave your warm bed and come into work. And when you arrive there and turn into your cubicle what do you see sitting in the middle of your desk but a foot-high stack of interconnected computer paper; it’s called a “core dump” and it’s all in hexadecimal code (i.e. machine language, not COBOL) and you’re supposed to find out what the hell happened to a batch update program that just blew up and which must run before the program that cuts the payroll checks can be run, and the program is not one that you wrote nor know anything about, but it’s a program that you must fix and pronto. And the thing is: the program that blew up might not even be the problem. So, to function as a programmer, you often need to be something of a sleuth, a detective.
This kid started programming computers before Mike Bloomberg formed his company in 1981, which means before the debut of the personal computer by IBM. It was during the “Age of the Mainframe Computer,” RIP. Back then, businesses and institutions had large staffs of applications programmers developing systems specifically for those enterprises. One couldn’t just saunter into Best Buy and buy a DVD to do your payroll, taxes, or whatever; your programmers had to write such software for you. And back in those hoary days of yesteryear when I would encounter jokers like Joe Biden pooh-poohing the difficulty of writing computer programs, I’d think about how quickly they could become dependable productive programmers. And what I came up with was: a minimum of a year of fulltime work and study. And that’s a year not for somebody “who can throw coal into a furnace,” but for your average Ph.D. without experience in computers.
Of course, nowadays one can’t find PhDs without computer experience. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find Americans who don’t own computers, inasmuch as their smartphones are sophisticated computers. So virtually everybody has some experience with some kind of computer, even if it’s just the self-check-out lines at Walmart or an ATM. Despite that, it may be more difficult to learn programming now than 40 years ago, because computers do so much more now. Even when mainframes ruled the Earth, programmers had to continually be updating their know-how by learning new programming languages, new operating systems, new access methods, etc. etc.
It’s a pity that at the aforementioned event when Biden spoke of the ease of learning to program that no one thought to ask the obvious question: Vice-President Biden, can you program? If Joe can’t program computers, then his observations on the ease with which coal miners can retrain and move into a radically different profession carry no weight and can be summarily dismissed. Now more than ever, it’s essential that our leaders know what they don’t know.
Unlike Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg is someone who appreciates the rigors of working in Information Technology. However, Bloomberg doesn’t appreciate the brains it takes to be a farmer, which Victor Davis Hanson passionately responded to on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. (For more of VDH on farming, listen to this podcast at Hoover.) Bloomberg’s “genius” was incorrectly identifying a need 40 years ago and then filling that need. And to corner the market on market information, Mike had to hire a bunch of “nerds” who could program.
It should be fairly obvious that computer programming might not be quite as simple as Joe Biden thinks it is. If it were so simple, then why would some of the biggest personal fortunes in the world be those of people in the software biz? There was a time when Microsoft’s Bill Gates was the richest man on the planet. Biden’s claims about the ease of learning to program are facially false. (I’d say Mr. Biden needs a “core dump.”) But the question remains: What the devil is old Joe really planning to do about all the coal miners he’s planning to put out of work?
