President Obama calls on every American to learn code

Well, stuxnet breaks things in one or two specific known ways on purpose and the healthcare site is broken in lots of unknown ways by accident. You think that is fair?

1) I don't know what country you're from, but in America here is how it works: In general, competitive colleges require at least two years of foreign language classes in high school. Stanford would like to see three or more years, and Harvard urges applicants to take four years.

When a college recommends "two or more" years of a language, they are clearly signaling that language study beyond two years would strengthen your application. No matter where you apply for college, a demonstrated proficiency in a second language will strengthen your application.

Students who have just the minimum can win admission if their applications demonstrate strengths in other areas. Some less competitive schools don't even have a high school language requirement and assume some students will simply study a language once they get to college.

If you score a 4 or 5 on an AP (advanced placement) language exam, most colleges will consider that evidence of adequate high school foreign language preparation (and you're likely to get course credit in college).

2) Foreign language requirements are originally a product of enlightenment era education curriculum and have been kept afloat with notions that in a globalizing economy candidates who can work internationally will garner higher wages and be more productive. This is true, to a degree, but wouldn't you rather work for a Swedish web design firm from your US based coffee shop?

I am guessing it's going to get substantially easier to program going forward. Look at amount of tools and technologies we have access to. Communities, Github, Refactoring, Intellisense. So many things just out of the box. Many ready made, battle tested libraries and frameworks. It's going to get a lot easier for a non computer science person to do some end level programming. Like dragging some blocks (just thinking out loud). Or encouraging youngsters to learn to code now will unfold a future which we can't even fully fathom now (AI, robotics, drones, medicinal advancements)

> If you agree that teaching people to code will result in more professional software developers, which seems reasonable to me, we'll have more of them and the cost of any one of them will be reduced.

I'm not sure I can agree with that, though. The barrier to entry is already really damn low -- the kids who are seriously interested in programming are already learning to program anyway, because it only costs them their time. The net effect will probably just be that the average student will become a bit more knowledgeable about how software works, which is pretty undisputably a good thing. If you go into a high school district and make a home economics class mandatory, are half of your graduates going to become chefs? Of course not -- only a few are going to do that, and they were probably going to do it before you even made the class mandatory. The only difference is that now everyone knows how to cook for themselves.

> And again, the skill thing is diminished because we all suck at figuring out who the talented developers are.

On the contrary, I think giving everybody a baseline knowledge of programming could have the opposite effect. If you study English at a liberal arts college and blast through the Codecademy Javascript tutorial over the weekend, you can see why you might think that a career as a programmer would be good for you -- you don't have any technical friends to talk to about what you've learned, and Codecademy says you learned everything there is to know about Javascript, so obviously you must be ready for a web development position, right? You have to know what you don't know, and the problem with unqualified developers is that they don't know what they don't know. If everyone learns how to write functions in high school, then you're acutely aware that there's a whole world of stuff you won't know unless you study independently.

> I'm not saying we should hoard the coding knowledge or whatever -- that cat is already out of the bag.

To be honest, most of the objections to the "everyone should learn to code" suggestion sound like that. It seems like everyone is extremely concerned with protecting the value of their own education, no matter what the cost.

> But if the president is saying nice things about coders, maybe think about what reasons he could have for that besides the goodness of his heart.

What are you suggesting here? The president has an evil plan to destroy your livelihood?

>Sure, except we talk all the time about how bad hiring practices are in our industry, how bad we all are at discerning talent. So I don't really see this being a positive thing for existing developers

This only applies if there's no way hiring practices could possibly improve, which given the existence of some data on the subject seems unlikely. In particular, it's not too far-fetched that people with some coding literacy may make better hiring decisions than Muggles.

>Large employers in this company would like to have labor costs reduced, especially for costly positions like software development. I'm not saying that is necessarily a sinister thing, but things like this should be thought of in the context of reducing labor costs.

Reducing labor costs in the long run reduces average prices and increases real incomes. Historically, it's not usually a bad thing; in this case, real incomes[1] go up whenever cost savings are passed to consumers.

The market may not be perfect, but it's usually better than fiat and ignorance.

[1]: cost-adjusted income, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_income