Please don't learn to code

I'm great believer that anyone can get to be _reasonably_ good at something if they invest enough time and effort into it.

It's the classic logarithm curve; when you have no skills in a field, you can learn a few skills really easily (steap curve). Then, as you get better, your progress for effort-expended goes down until you're basically a domain expect (flat line; no matter what you do you basically dont get any better).

This applies to ANYONE on ANY field; the curves are just different; and I'd argue the steep part of the curve is pretty long for programming (compared to say, I dunno; learning differential equations).

Despite the great them-and-us divide that geeks (and here I generalize based on the geeks that _I_ know personally) seem to have to 'other people' who are 'dumb' ... people are, in my experience, generally smarter than you'd expect.

I'd rather encourage people to learn a little bit, than tell them to go away because they're probably not smart enough. *, and if I see someone do it, it makes me angry... although, I realize you weren't directly saying that, so please, take this as a general comment, not as a criticism of you personally. :)

Traversing those learning curves is more rewarding the longer you keep at it. Also, it's rare that one field of knowledge doesn't benefit many more.

Mr Attwood has a point, in that average Joe certainly doesn't need to program in order to understand their domain better. But I would ask rather then, how can one educate people on how machines work other than writing code ( I seem to remember what little was done in my education about computing, taught me little about the practicality of why in a machine )

When I was an undergrad the first lecture I had in CS was my favorite. Still is. It discussed how fundamental scientific discoveries and technology affect how humans view the world and solving problems. To quickly paraphrase as industrialization began to take shape we saw the world as a machine. And so we looked for problems that could be solved by viewing them as a machine. As electricity was discovered and commercialized we saw the world as a circuit. Our brain compared to a circuit, and our nerves were the wires. Is our brain an actual circuit well not entirely, but this idea helped us make other discoveries about the brain. As each of these technologies took root in the minds of humans we shifted our paradigms and began to solve problems differently than prior generations or prior paradigms. These paradigms tend to have long life cycles going on for decades, and that's why they are important to recognize.

The introduction of computers, and particularly computer programming, has changed our paradigm again. How we solve problems with programming is fundamentally different than how we solved it with physics, chemistry, etc. And I think that's the life skill we want to pass along to non-coders because it changes how you approach problems. As we take what was physical and turn it into a digital representation it changes how you use it to solve problems. And when I look at coding in that respect I do think its important to learn, but I wouldn't teach it the same way as most are learning it.