Back in the day when I was still in secondary school, I have been an ardent proponent of strengthening the programming abilities of the people in the computer club. Heck, when I was in junior college, I was essentially doing the same thing (but that is another story altogether for another time).
Back then, people thought that I was a crazy-assed heretic---the biggest thing was the whole web phenomenon (that and the whole shebang over video production). No one believed what I had to say, and I paid the price of being further ostracised, more so than just the ``we come from the west of Singapore and you come from the east and so you are less cool'' form of discrimination. Kept physically away from the Big Three Divisions (micromouse, robotics, and web), I was the de facto head of a phantom fourth division---the programming division. It was quite sad actually, me sitting alone, working on algorithms and such, while the rest of the people were basically laughing their socks at me for being the oddball I was, by wanting to do something that the rest of them were not doing.
Fast-forward 10 years. Yes, 10 years. Look around you. Look at the web. What do you find?
Almost all the ``useful'' websites are done clever uses of ``scripting'', a slang term created by web designers to retain their street cred as designers as opposed to those ``smelly'' basement-dwelling hackers/programmers. Throw away all the fanciful terms, and what do we get? It is just a lot of good old-fashioned programming at work.
Except this time, it is not well-trained programmers who are doing the task---it is a bunch of self-styled web designers who think they know how to program.
If you have not been living in a hole in the last 6 years, you would realise that many of the directed attacks and phishing attempts are propagated through the Internet. Things like ``SQL Injection Attack'' should not sound too foreign. The question here is, who wrote the code to allow the ``SQL Injection Attack'' to take place? Could it be the hackers/programmers? Unlikely, since those folks are more interested in hacking on the kernel/userspace programs/applications and will most likely rather be caught with their pants down than to be caught doing web pages.
So yes, it is largely a straw man here. But my point is that I was right and they were wrong, and now the world is a suckier place because many of the kids in the past refused to take programming seriously, and are now reinventing the wheel and causing all kinds of snafus.
Alright, I'm hungry and need food of some sort. This is suboptimal for now.
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