Teach kids to farm, not code.

> Growing food is far more challenging

...NOT!!! I know you Americans tend to see having a basic little vegetable garden as "black magic", but it's really something one can learn in under a week and based on this knowledge grow things to the point that one can actually produce enough for sale and maybe run a small business! But's you can't learn programming well enough to actually get any benefit out of it, let alone actually make a living from this alone, in a week! Yeah, I pick my food from the supermarket just like you, but I spent enough of my childhood at a farm know that things are really easy (at least if don't try running your little garden as a real business and get enough profit to cover marketing, distribution etc. - then shit gets really complicated), basically high-school biology is more than enough and everything can be found in any book or googled in minutes and you have tools that come with all the needed instructions and seed, herbicedes etc.

It all boils to this funny observation: plants can grow by themselves, you just need to guide things a bit to get the desired outcome! otoh, computers don't program themselves, code doesn't write itself - you have to do it, and this is why it's hard and also fun and rewarding (for a comparison, starting to learn how to farm by writing the genetic code of the organism's you'll be farming - ok, it's and orders of magnitude exaggeration, but it's still the closest way farming could be alike to coding).

I don't disagree - but energy, mining, and forestry are also fundamental parts of the economy (with transportation, construction, and manufacturing on the level just above those), and if we're talking about giving kids a rudimentary insight of the mechanics and economy of this big system in which we all live, I don't see any reason to stop at agriculture.

> Another problem is that farming doesn't seem very profitable even on the large / capital scale, because the barrier to entry is so low.

For what it is worth, I make considerably more money per hour farming than I do programming, and I get paid quite well to be a programmer.

With farming, however, the barrier to entry is actually quite high. That barrier being access to capital. It is the massive debt any normal person has to take on to even think about farming that cripples most.

Programmers are quite lucky that you only need one reasonably affordable tool, which almost everyone already owns, and you are eligible to enter the market.

I don't think we should encourage anyone to do anything. We should discourage them.

Let me explain...

I take my example from this traditional practice of Rabbis: never accept a convert until they have been turned away twice before. Make them make 3 attempts to show their determination. Why? Because Judaism is hard. If they're not committed, they'll either give up or do just enough to satisify the minimum requirements, wasting everyone's time.

Same thing with programming. Building real applications that deliver sustainable value over time is hard. It pretty much takes all that you've got and can take years to reach excellence.

Every time I see another way to learn how to be a programmer (now that there's money in the game, they seem to be popping up everywhere), I have two immediate reactions: 1. How cool is that. I wish I had that years ago. 2. No! We had enough bad programmers who are doing it for all the wrong reasons.

I believe the most important difference between an excellent programmer and everyone else is not intelligence, education, emotional state, or work ethic (although all of these help). The most important thing is a burning desire to build.

Someone with this burning desire won't not need to be encouraged. You won't be able to stop them. Someone without it would be better off doing something else.

We don't need more programmers. (Only IT execs who akin programmers to envelope stuffers think that.) We need more excellent programmers.

The best way to get more excellent programmers? Discourage everyone so that only the most determined can make it.

Our industry, our craft, and most of all, are code repositories would be much better off.

The bit teaching kids to farm seems like a straw man regarding what is most important to learn. Learning to farm and learning to code are not mutually exclusive, and may even require overlapping skills (manipulating an environment with a given set of constraints to yield the most favorable results).

Yet, the OP's conclusion presents a stronger argument for learning to code than learning to farm: "What code.org promotes is teaching kids how to look at problems, analyse them and present them in a way that captures what they are trying to solve. It promotes teaching kids how to use a new tool that can assist them to devise solutions to whatever problems they desire. Most importantly it promotes teaching them a tool that they can use to express and communicate this."

This seems like an even stronger endorsement for learning to code than anything even in the code.org video.

I think the real underlying sentiment in this post is to not learn to code for the wrong reasons, but kids don't care about future rewards like "vats of riches, shiny things and scantily clad women." They gravitate to things that are fun and that capture their attention in the here and now. Making a sprite spin in a circle in Scratch was all it took to get my 4 year old nephew's eyes to light up. He can decide one day whether he'd rather code for altruism or profit (again, not that they are mutually exclusive).