Fluency - understanding vs mastery

One of my music theory teachers told our college class, "90% of you won't make a living playing music. But you'll add tremendous value to our communities simply because you understand how music works and what it can accomplish."

Fluency doesn't have to mean mastery, or even constant practice.

It could simply mean understanding.

A recent and very thorough piece in Mother Jones by Tasneem Raja on code fluency brings this idea into better focus.

"It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. As the cities that have hosted Code for America teams will tell you, the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn't the software they write. It's the way they think. It's a principle called "computational thinking," and knowing all of the Java syntax in the world won't help if you can't think of good ways to apply it."

This is precisely the current point.

What matters most in our advertising, design, interactive and PR agencies now isn't yours or my ability to code. What matters is our ability to understand how code can express and enable ideas. What matters is our curiosity--our interest, our experimentation. It's the first step in fluency.

Read Tasneem's excellent piece.