Programmers Wanted

Hi all,

I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it; this country needs more computer scientists. More programmers at least. It really does baffle me as to why the government has chosen not to invest its support and finance into the UK computing industry. The computer games industry were hit particularly hard, where tax relief was missed and growth was not encouraged at all. I'm a supporter of our games industry here in the UK. Both for the benefit it brings to our economy and the respect our country gets for, well, providing entertainment and talent. Video games are like novels or films (apparently the video games industry is earning more than the film and music industries combined), so they are an expression of creativity. Of course, to extract that creativity into a working and professional looking video game, you need programmers.

Back in the 80's and early 90's, schools were teaching programming to children through the medium of the computers of those ages - the BBC Micro being a pivotal model in the teaching of programming. Back then, many kids could apply what they had learnt at school into their ZX Spectrums and Ataris back at home. The only way you could play games on such consoles was to program them. Some of the earlier models only had volatile memory, so every time you switched on the device you had to re-program the lines of code to play it (more often than not, they were fairly simple games). This, coupled with the rush of magazines that supplied program code for fancy programs you could try out, allowed a generation of children to see through the code and start creating their own, or even manipulating existing code. It's exciting to know that you have such a wide range of processing potential using nothing but a keyboard. It's like giving an artist a colour palette and a blank canvas. With the exception of the fact that the artist can undo his paint strokes.

I used to have an ambition for becoming a video games designer. It's always an option, I guess. I'd rather do something a bit more contributive to the world as a whole, though. Something more meaningful. I consider myself creative to an extent, but I'm much more a person of academics. I have turned my attention to research, and want to teach myself as well as the world.

So yeah, basically, there needs to be more computer scientists in the world. For goodness' sake, technology = computers, and computers = programmers. Unless we want to slow down our advance in technology, more people should be taught in the art of programming. I think it should be taught as a core subject, alongside Maths and English. It's not like we're not going to be using computers is the near and distant future, that's certain. Unless you know, there's an apocalypse. But that's down to the religious people to argue over (for eternity)

Until next time.