Last week, my inbox began to fill up with angry emails. Had I seen the dreadful/unbelievable/disgraceful/hilarious (delete as appropriate) "Newsnight" interview with Lottie Dexter? I hadn't, and as I'd never heard of Ms. Dexter, I wasn't unduly bothered. After all, life is too short to watch every edition of "Newsnight."
Still, the drumbeat of indignation in my inbox was insistent enough to make me Google her. It turned out that she is the executive director of something called Year of Code, an outfit that had just been launched. According to its website, it's "an independent, nonprofit campaign to encourage people across the country to get coding for the first time in 2014. Through code, people can discover the power of computer science, changing the way they think about, and get the most out of, the world around them."
Getting its spokesperson onto "Newsnight" was obviously a PR coup of some magnitude for the startup, which suggests, among other things, that the program's new editor, Ian Katz, is still a bit wet behind the ears. Intrigued, I headed over to YouTube to find the interview that was so exercising my correspondents. Dexter was interviewed by bullish TV journalist Jeremy Paxman in full disdainful mode. "How easy is it," he inquired grandly, "to learn to code?" "I'm going to put my cards on the table," she replied. "I can't code. I've committed this year to learn to code." "A year!" said Paxman, incredulously. "Well," she explained, "you can do very little in a short space of time." A few minutes later, however, she explained to an increasingly incredulous Paxo that teachers (who are the prime target of Year of Code) would be able to "pick it up in a day."