Programming is an adult way to treat a computer as opposed to the absolute infantilism most people approach their computers, or devices with. It's as much to say I understand that what happens on the hardware end is what is happening as the consumer, even though the processes seem completely different.
And none of it is easy or obvious. Dijkstra said teaching computer science was absolute cruelty because it does not truly reflect anything else in the world.
If you are going to work with computers don't think that an email server is an online mail room, don't go down the road of thinking that copyright law holds from one medium to the other because the idea behind the product is the same.
Don't think that skype is a telephone, don't think that facebook is the beatles of today, do know what something is, do know that the only intersection between life and computers is via maths and logic, do understand that these things matter now and will matter in the future.
And none of it is easy or obvious. Dijkstra said teaching computer science was absolute cruelty because it does not truly reflect anything else in the world.
If you are going to work with computers don't think that an email server is an online mail room, don't go down the road of thinking that copyright law holds from one medium to the other because the idea behind the product is the same.
Don't think that skype is a telephone, don't think that facebook is the beatles of today, do know what something is, do know that the only intersection between life and computers is via maths and logic, do understand that these things matter now and will matter in the future.