I wrote about it here — http://joshuaspodek.com/leaving-facebook-easy-and-fun. Like you said, Facebook isn’t now what I signed up for. Now it gets in the way of interacting with people. And it’s creepy.

Personally I don’t like Google+ any more since they’re both in an arms race to profit off your data, but Diaspora, which is peer-to-peer, so you own your data, looks promising, though it’s small now.

Thanks for the post!

Josh

tl;dr: It was hard work. In the end, it’s worth it.

As you thought about contributing you cleaned up data back to TFL.

quit now and be more productive and real time social!

Teaching people to read any arbitrary regex is not going to go well though; of course there will always be regexes which are utterly cryptic (I still find this and I’ve been writing them for over a decade).

Once young people realise the many different applications that a computer can be put to with a bit of coding (incl. all those mentioned in your post) and have the confidence to experiment themselves, they can develop their own skills, using the myriad resources available. (Many freely on the internet.) That knowledge is essential for all the myriad roles computer scientists might find themselves taking.

Many kids lack either the knowledge or confidence. They will forever be consigned either to being basic users of other people’s applications, or try and learn this stuff later, and struggle to e.g. distinguish Javascript from PHP… This is only getting worse as companies like Apple draw a sharper and sharper distinction between consumers and programmers. (E.g. making OS X looking more and more like iOS.)

This makes digital literacy a lot like numeracy – with kids who don’t leave school numerically literate forever disadvantaged. Just as with numeracy, schools have an essential role teaching the basics, and when it comes to computer sciences that does mean writing and running code.

@Psychedelic Squid – Yes, regular expressions are important, but perhaps a little daunting for the beginner, and it’s very easy to get bogged down in a confusing mess. I’d put them as a “second-tier” thing to learn and understand, along with how to do some basic POSIX-y tasks from the command line. In its place I’d probably introduce some gentler data extraction tools like ScraperWiki that weren’t around three years ago…

Actually, I’d say they’re still very important. There’s plenty of times where I’ve got partway into coding some small, repetitive task, only to have it dawn on me that that part could be replaced by a fairly short, well-crafted regex.

Sure, they might be a little complex, but they’re supported well in the vast majority of programming languages (at least those that are still in use), and they’re the best solution in more cases than you might initially think.

(Plus, if you end up using one of the several POSIX-y systems as your primary OS, there are plenty of very useful utilities that make heavy use of regex (or very similar) syntax, such as grep and sed, to name just 2.)