I’ve been searching for a pithy phrase to capture an idea, and the title of this piece takes my best shot. For ages, we’ve imagined that non-programmers can, on some level, learn to adapt the software that they use. Many did, most dramatically by engaging with Excel’s programming features, but most did not. And though I’m an admirer of Yahoo Pipes, I don’t think that a visual skin on top of a procedural programming model will appeal broadly to folks who otherwise aren’t inclined toward procedural programming.

Now arguably, the reason that most people aren’t so inclined is that we’ve failed to teach computational thinking1. Jeanette Wing’s manifesto on this topic invites us to imagine how the intellectual tools of programming — including abstraction, naming, composition, refactoring, heuristic reasoning, and separation of concerns — add up to “a universally applicable attitude and skill set that everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use.”

I’m sure Jeanette Wing is right, I hope she will persuade educators, and I’m delighted to discover that Microsoft Research is sponsoring the Center for Computational Thinking at Carnegie Mellon to explore this topic. Meanwhile, I wonder if we’re seeing the emergence, in the wild, of a very basic form of computational thinking that may prove to be intuitive and broadly accessible.

As I mentioned in my talk at Berkeley earlier this week, the elmcity.info project invites people to use tags not only to describe things, but also to compose and coordinate simple services. So for example, by posting a geotagged photo of a restaurant menu to Flickr, with the right set of tags, you’re both helping to create a directory service and enhancing that directory with Flickr’s image services and Yahoo’s mapping services. By posting a video clip of a candidate’s appearance to YouTube, along with the tag nhprimary, you’re helping to build a database of clips. By posting an event to Eventful along with the tag podcorps, you’re making a request for service — that is, you’re inviting one of the PodCorps.org stringers to help you record and publish a podcast of your event.

One of the trends in programming is the transition to a more declarative style. Where possible, you specify what you want to retrieve from the database, rather than how to retrieve it. Where possible, you specify which transactional or security behaviors your service should have, rather than how to implement those behaviors.

Among other things, tagging may become to ordinary folks what attributes are becoming to programmers: a language that doesn’t just describe things, but also invokes and coordinates behaviors.

1
Thanks to Patrick Phelan for pointing me to Jeanette Wing’s work.