Please Don't Become Anything, Especially Not A Programmer

>Jeff's article then proceeds to present a very reasonable argument to consider for why you might not want to code, specifically, there are many useful skills in the world and maybe there's one that would serve you better than coding.

Programming is a super-power, even if you only know a little bit. Knowing how to program gives you abilities to create unequaled in the history of the world. I think that the more people who know how to program, the better, even if they "suck" by comparison to a rock star programmer (or alternately a fat guy who knows C++ [1]).

Maybe 95% of people will never be lead programmer on a commercial product, but almost everyone ends up, e.g., searching Google -- and not being afraid of complex search results can mean the difference between digging through six pages of garbage and getting relevant results right away because you weren't afraid to use the minus operator or other more "advanced" search features.

And probably most people in the workplace have to deal with an Excel spreadsheet from time to time -- being willing to dig into creating more complex formulas because they aren't afraid of lists of functions with parameters would be an obvious side effect of knowing a bit of code.

Regardless, Zed is saying that no one should be telling you that you SHOULDN'T learn to program, period. And I agree.

[1] http://betabeat.com/2012/05/04/pro-tip-from-silicon-valley-s...

I'm all for conversation, but is anyone else getting tired of this predictable circlejerk of

1) Industry guy A says this in a blog post!

2) Industry guy B doesn't agree! So he writes a blog post arguing the opposite point.

3) Industry guy C is above this argument, so he posts a blog espousing a deeper philosophy on the matter.

It seems noisy and totally counterproductive, and yet all 3 articles will inevitably show up on the front of HN. Hell, I'll even admit that I've bought into it a few times, but it's just getting a little old. It just smacks of a bunch of bloggers trying to leech off each others' hits.

Again funny how people read different things from the same text :-) . That's not what I was trying to say. On the contrary to master a craft you will need to learn several different skills and a craft is something thing that you can learn, but more importantly must learn and study to master. I'm not saying this should be out of reach for most people as is any craft, if you want to learn something you should be able to and I applaud any afford to make it more affordable and easier . but contrary to reading and arithmetic etc it is not something you must learn to be a productive member to society. This is true not only for coding but for any craft, be it plumbing, sewing carpentry, Medical professions etc.

What we call physics is not math. Math is how we interpret them. Just like code is how we interpret ideas in a manner that a computer can process.

Quantum physics is not even aptly defined because no one understands them. Sure, we may have some insight into how some things work at the quantum level but we have not a clue.

My point, which I reason you missed, is that people find math hard yet they manage to learn how to program. These days, one can make a reasonable living as a coder without knowing much math.

I'm not even going to pretend to be a genius, not even smart. But I can sure understand that programming is not what fellow engineers make it out to be.

It is neither Quantum physics nor hard. It is, in my opinion, simple (and beautiful).

Discouraging people from learning how to code is akin to discouraging people from learning how to speak.

In a world where the Internet is the only mass medium of communication, knowing how to code enables freedom of thought, and speech.

A freedom we cannot let die.

The attack zed makes here on jeff atwood is short sighted and unfair heckling. If you actually read jeff's article, he only argues that coding is not a fundamental skill like writing or arithmetic. From that, zed posits that jeff doesn't want your kids to program. Yeah zed, that's why he worked long and hard on stackoverflow.

Speak for yourself next time.