So I got to thinking about creating an approachable pathway to IT careers
for anyone really, but in the spirit of today one focused on creating
career opportunities for African Americans.
The idea would be a code camp developed around algorithmic generation of
music. I know nothing about music theory, except that there is prolly
enough there to introduce most if not all fundamental programming concepts.
For those campers that accidentally get hooked on programming itself, which
is how many of us ended up in IT careers, away they go!
The idea is to:
- use music as the hook;
- defer as long as possible the annoying things about programming (I am
looking at you, node.js);
- part of that ^^^ will be using a powerful language with the
parentheses in the right place, prolly ClojureScript since that could run
where JS runs;
- keep programming as the focus, as tempting as the music will be. Sonic
Pi comes with all sorts of built-in sound capabilities, but we want to
*develop* those in the code camp;
- tailor the program to specific musical genres, to maximize the musical
hook.
I am dropping this here since I know many Common Lispers have a strong
musical bent. My questions are:
- Could we use CL instead? I do think this almost has to be a web app,
perhaps even mobile. Hmmm, we *could* CL-ify CLJS with sufficent clever
macrology.
- What do you think? Can a solid programming fundamentals course be
expressed in music theory? Hint: HTTP is not a programming fundamental.
- If there is any interest, what would be a good place for an ongoing
discussion? Google groups?
Ideas, comments, suggestions all welcome.
-hk
