Why Everyone Should Not Learn To Code

Just because you took high school Biology or Physics did not make you into a Biologist or a Physicist. It merely introduced you to the most distilled and complete parts of those fields and had no pretense of professional training or a career choice.

In a similar manner, people are pushing for the most distilled parts of Computer Science to enter school curricula. This would _not_ mean that after that course you are a programmer, or a computer scientist, or even proficient with computers.

People fail at Biology or Mathematics and have different aptitudes.

What it would mean, however, is that you are exposed to _computational thinking_ [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~CompThink/], an understanding perhaps that somethings are computable and somethings are not, rudimentary programming skills, and a different outlook on Computers in general.

Thus, people would no longer look at computers as purely black boxes and magical, they would understand them a bit better and have a rudimentary understanding of a field which affects almost everything in their life today.

We feel Physics and Biology and Chemistry and Calculus are important, why not add Computer Science to the mix?

Do not confuse professional training with simple education.

New season of American Idol (or is it X factor now?).

This article sounds like it was written by someone who's used to working amongst groups of mediocre to poor developers, and thinks that educating people will equate to legions of more mediocre developers.

Computers and code are a part of our lives now, and people should be educated in the basics. Just like we have biology, physics, chemistry, and shop class, a basic code class should be required for all young people.

Have a good read of this linguistic relativity summary on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity).

The short version is: The concepts you have affect the way you think, and that affects the way you behave.

We're not trying to get everyone to build software. That's a stupid idea. Most people don't need to; sure, it's cool that you could do a macro or something if you wanted to, but it's probably irrelevant to most people. Even with modern high-level frameworks, it's a titanic effort to do anything practical with programming.

...but the point is, logical flow, breaking down ideas into units, inter-changable implementations of anything that matching a common interface, understanding how a 'source' document can be converted into an 'executable' object that makes computers do things, creating a virtual 'model' of a real situation and simulating it.... These are powerful ideas, that can't simply be grasped by telling someone about them abstractly. You have to learn the symbols and incorporate them into your own mental model.

More than that, they're tangible ideas that extend far beyond the bounds of computers and into other domains, helping people organize and breakdown problems.

The point is, you should learn to code.

...maybe you'll never actually write a real program that you'll use to do things, but that doesn't matter. By learning how to do it, you're gaining a mental richness.

Failure to appreciate that, from an educator appalls me.