Maybe journalists should just talk to themselves

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/04/learn-programming-software-app-java

Woman journalist goes on a one-day course to find out whether she can learn to code. By the end of the day she thinks she can. Mostly because she knows nothing about programming.

Software developers and others who program for a living point out in the comments that she actually does not now know how to code. She also did not create an app.

Male Tech journalists yells at the commenters for picking on the woman journalist who may not know that she cannot code but who did gain satisfaction at producing something that worked.

Note that without the comments, readers who were ignorant of programming would not have been aware that what the writer was doing was shallow and quite poor in terms of learning.

I was alerted to the article by a Tweet from @mjrobbins:

Guardian Tech writer (@currybet) loses patience with “smug know-it-all patronising killjoys” – bravo, sir. http://bit.ly/A74uxp

@mjrobbins applauds the Guardian Tech writer @currybet. I am on the side of the people who know programming and realise that the article is misleading.

Update: As Martin Belam points out in the comments, he is not a writer at the Guardian. Apologies.