Why Everyone Should Not Learn To Code

1. Compare programming to home DIY. Sure, every year you'll have people who knock down load-bearing walls, get pesticide backwash into the drinking water, or turn a simple de-icing operation into a raging inferno. But people also assemble millions of shelves and beds, unclog millions of drains, and build thousands of greenhouses and planter boxes.

2. Professional programmers create awful messes too. They do it less often, but with greater consequences. Just like the contractors building a bridge are less likely to screw up than some goofball installing a new water heater at home, but a bad bridge is much more dangerous. Give people more training when the potential consequences of bad work are more severe, and less training when it's just not needed.

3. The value of someone with both domain knowledge and programming knowledge is usually immense. You can either teach a programmer about the domain, or you can teach a domain expert how to program. If you have a programmer with a bit of domain knowledge, then they know what kind of questions to ask the domain experts. If you have a domain expert with a bit of programming knowledge, then they know how to communicate technical requirements to a professional programmer.

Let's take your analogy with the publishing house. If the fantastic storyteller can write but has major problems with grammar and continuity, then a good editor can clean things up.

The linked article promotes one of the more common and misleading myths abut computer programming -- that it lies in a domain separate from normal behavior. That it is qualitatively different than ordinary computer use.

But in reality, people all lie on a spectrum between pathological innumeracy on one extreme, and extreme programming skill on the other. Between the extremes, we have:

* People who can accurately add a column of figures.

* People who can operate a calculator.

* People who can efficiently use a spreadsheet application.

* People who can write an efficient spreadsheet "program" by filling cells with the right functions to solve various practical problems of increasing complexity.

* People who can write Word or Excel (or LibreOffice) macros to solve certain kinds of problems.

* People willing to write small programs in easily accessible application languages like Visual Basic and similar languages integrated into end-user applications.

* People who write computer programs for their own use.

* People who write computer programs for others to use.

The above list isn't exhaustive -- it's only means to dispel the idea that there are "programmers" and mortals, located in separate categories. This is nonsense. The faulty thinking behind this myth will become more obvious as we become more accustomed to the presence of computers in our lives, and as computers, and computer languages, mature.

+1 - I think you have gotten the gist of my article. Believe me when I say that I really do want to see more programmers out there cranking out great software. I don't want to see a bunch of people with enough coding knowledge to build a program, throw it into production without having any knowledge of why the program works. An extreme example would be teaching everyone how to use guns because the future is going to be full of gun violence. Leave guns to those who are trained to carry and use them appropriately.