Please don't learn to code

Agree with both sides. The meme of everyone needs to learn code needs context.

Should everyone have an understanding- probably. Should everyone build a public bit of code - probably not.

Coding as a hobby is great but making strategic decisions still requires experts.

> the mayor of New York City will hopefully spend his time doing the job taxpayers paid him to do instead. According to the Office of the Mayor home page, that means working on absenteeism programs for schools, public transit improvements, the 2013 city budget, and … do I really need to go on?

Being a Mayor means it is his job, not his life, outside of work it's not our business to tell him he's wasting time regardless of whether he's learning to code or reading the first Harry Potter book over and over again.

I think the whole everyone should learn to code this is right, but a little ahead of its time. A little like saying that peasant farmers in the bronze age should learn to read and write. While 100% literacy is now acknowledge as a good thing it took a while to get here. A farmer these days absolutely needs to read and write. But a bronze age farmer? Not so much.

I personally think that one day it will be impossible to function in society without the ability to manipulate and query data. To use Jeff's example, as Mayor of a large city there must be mountains of data that might be relevant to every single decision that is made, and the mayors who can query and gain insight into that data quickly (without having to write a spec and get someone else to do it for them) will eventually be more successful, to the point where all mayors will be expected to be able to manipulate data.

There are a number of things that need to happen before that though:

Firstly, the tools need to get a LOT better. I put our current development tools somewhere a kin to Egyptian hieroglyphics. You can do basic things like record the births and deaths of kings, but could Shakespeare have written what he did in hieroglyphics? I'm guessing not. (Although I bet someone somewhere has done a translation!)

Next, this vision of the future is based on the amount of data in the world getting a LOT bigger. To the point where intuition or past experience simply can't compete with the people who are mining the data.

Politics will probably be one of the last professions to convert, the cultural change will take a while to work though. The first professions will be the kind of things where Excel is used heavily at the moment (you could argue that Excel is a programming environment). Professions like Marketing, Manufacturing (which will become predominately robot driven at some point) and Medicine (which will become heavily influenced by generic programming) will probably be early adopters. But one day, I think "programming" in the sense of giving a "machine" a series of logical instructions to follow, will be universal and it will simply be impossible to live a normal life without that skill.

EDIT: Fixed ironic typo ;)

Except in cases where a little knowledge of the subject is more dangerous than no knowledge.

(But I disagree with the post, teaching people to program would be a net gain I think but I'm sure most people won't bother so no danger of ever finding out.)

So I wrote a piece advocating why everyone should learn to code:

http://reviewsindepth.com/2011/04/why-everyone-should-learn-...

I don't think Jeff's piece undermines any of the reasons I put forward there.

Going through his points one by one.

It's easy to agree that you should ideally write no code - but of course the ideal assumes that all the provided interfaces in the world provide you with everything you desire, need. The point is that the world is such that most of the time this is not the case.

It does not assume that coding is the goal. It assumes that there are always various goals that have not been met by existing interfaces or infrastructure. (i.e. that the ideal in the first point can never be achieved in reality)

It doesn't necessarily put the method before the problem. It's just assuming that the many of the problems faced by a majority of people (or everyone) in western society can be solved with code.

His next point speak to professionalism in coding. In large software projects - you absolutely need professionalism. But many problems people face don't require large software projects to solve. I give an example in the linked piece above of a problem I solved with code that certainly didn't need a large software project.

His final point - it does not imply this thin membrane between professionalism and being an amateur coder. In fact - I advocate the complete opposite, yet still think everyone should code. I'm not sure why he thinks it does imply this - so its hard to argue against him here. To me it's prima facie not the case.