Where's the Revolution?: From "Code Year" to the Continuum of Proceduracy

Abstract

As the calendar turned over to 2012, an online learning initiative, Codecademy, declared it “Code Year”—the year “for everyone” to learn code. Within six months, this call has received much attention from the public and scholars in the university. Yet, this history and theory paper more deeply investigates this call for a new mass literacy, which was actually proposed back in the 1960s as procedural literacy, i.e., proceduracy. Accordingly, a history is told about how Computer Science ignored Alan Perlis’ call for procedural literacy and Rhetoric and Composition has just recently begun to address Marshall McLuhan’s media turn. From there, this paper connects new scholarship and applications surrounding the unexamined persuasive and expressive faculties of processes to literacy scholar Annette Vee’s levels of proceduracy. Finally, conclusions and implications of Rhetoric and Composition’s involvement in the deeper engagement with the writing of code are discussed.