Ask HN: What is the most compelling reason young people should learn to program?

Computers are everywhere, that trend is only increasing. True power now and in the future is learning the languages that tell those computers to do what you want.

That ability gives you power, money, respect, but most importantly it lets you influence the world around you.

If you want any or all of those things study computers.

Whenever this comes up, I ask myself: What are the reasons kids learn math? Reading poems, doing chemistry, or any other topic for that matter.

Naturally, there will always be someone who likes a given topic and there will be someone absolutely loathing it.

So people came up with different education systems (for the sake of discussion I keep it at two):

1. Let kids choose themselves what they want to learn [0]

2. Conventional education, where everyone gets to see a broad spectrum of topics, whether they like it or not

Personally, besides domain specific arguments for the importance of topics, I think showing kids different topics and letting them work in as many different fields as possible is important. And I don't just mean passive consumption of knowledge, but applying it.

There are definitely kids who know for certain what they're gonna do when they grow up, but for most people life isn't a straight line and age 13-18 is THE best time to try them out IMO.

As for domain specific arguments:

1. Applying logic is obviously going to benefit anyone, just like learning math. Surely, with a kid this argument won't fly, but it's directed towards HN so I'm pretty sure you guys know what I .

2. As many have pointed out and to point out the obvious once more: Computers are everywhere and everyone is using them. I honestly think people should know, at least on a surface level, how computers and networks actually function. This isn't necessarily an argument for programming, but programming goes hand in hand with what I'd call "tech literacy", so why not kill two birds with one stone.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

Knowing the basics of programming can be a great tool in a lot of professions.

I watch my wife perform a lot of tasks with spreadsheets to accomplish things her coworkers can't do (or would require a lot of manual work). Being able to import CSVs, do calculations, mail merges and other simple data processing may allow you to skip a lot of tedious manual work.

Programming is the next step. She would benefit from being able to write scripts to query different systems and then process more data than is practical in a spreadsheet, or do more complicated processing than a spreadsheet allows.

It's not something everyone needs (just like spreadsheets, or even calculators), but it can let you get a lot more done in many non-tech professions.

I agree. For instance, with cars, the essence of a car is driving, and hence the only thing that a common user cares about is learning how to drive one. In particular, a common user should not need, and are usually not interested in, having automechanic skills. On the contrary, that's the whole point of car manufactures and workshops, so that a common user doesn't have to care about those technical details under the hood, but just focus on the main task i.e. driving.

I think it's similar with computers and programs. The essence of a computer is information, so the main skill a common person needs is knowing how to work with information e.g. in the present day, navigate the web safely, how to research appropriately + identify reliable sources, organize and analyze data, manage privacy, etc They shouldn't have to be programmers themselves, and indeed, that's the whole point of software, so that a common person can focus on their main task of working with information, and not have to be concerned about technical details under the hood.

note: things like excel macros where a software has a programming-like feature is a different matter, since it's a feature exposed explicitly by the software for users to exploit if need be. In any case, it's a software choice and hence specific only to that software.

> it's still better to have a job with good benefits, salary, working conditions etc than one without those things.

I've seen people learn programming for the allure of money and job opportunities, but they just didn't enjoy the learning, debugging, engineering... And just end up quitting the endeavour due to frustration or boredom.

Basically, I wouldn't encourage someone to get into tech, unless they were interested... In the tech!