English: Yuvi Panda, "Stealing some of Wikimedia's Principles to Democratize Programming"

BIDS Data Science Lecture Series | October 14, 2016 | 1:10-2:30 p.m. | 190 Doe Library, UC Berkeley

Programming is an essentially complex activity—writing code is not easy in the same way writing a book is not easy. However, there is a lot of accidental complexity around writing code that can and should be eliminated. Classical examples of this include

- Installing things (Dependency hell! You need a different compiler! Wrong versions!) - Terminal text editors (You mean this works completely different than everything else I have used?) - Ssh (Try it on Windows! What is screen?) - Publishing your work (So there is git, and you might hear of github, but you really should use gerrit/gogs/phabricator/gitlab) - Deployment (I need to do what to let my friends use this?)

We're locking out a ton of really smart and resourceful people by making them jump through the equivalent of having to learn to write in perfect iambic parameter before being allowed to write up a shopping list. There is a ton of low-hanging fruit in terms of eliminating accidental complexity from specific types of programming tasks. This lecture talks about a few such efforts, stealing principles from the Wikimedia movement to democratize access to programming power.