We should teach all our kids to code

Yes, all schools should have a fantastic Computer Science department. And it should be more than CS, it should be "doing fun stuff with computers". However, there is a very large segment of the population who cannot program.

I've got a friend who's quite smart. She's charming and extremely capable at her job. I discovered that she has absolutely no ability to think in three dimensions. She cannot follow even a very simple series of motions. She parked her car near a post, came out, got confused, and destroyed the whole side of her car because she couldn't work out the spatial problem to get out.

I've known people who simply cannot grasp calculus. They're interesting people who offer value in the world. Calculus is a fundamental and wonderful thing to know, but that doesn't mean everyone can or should learn it.

I love programming, but I respect the variety of humanity enough to understand that it should not be mandatory.

The point of the article is that coding is in some sense a core/intrinsic skill. That anything you do is actually deeply tied to coding in the sense that "something you do" (technology, in the general sense) is equivalent to "algorithm." Weaving is coding. Playing a game is coding. Building a house is coding. Painting a picture is coding. Proving a theorem is coding (Curry-Howard Isomorphism). Sure, they're different, more intuitive, weird types of coding, but the fact that you can't see that they -are- coding implies a limitation on your ability to abstract the concept of "coding" sufficiently.

The fact is that coding is a deeply human activity, and that by understanding coding we are really understanding ourselves and the fundamental means by which we -collectively- understand reality. The fact is that we need some shared understanding of ourselves, of our logical facilities, of the basis of our ability to produce and thrive and know how to interact with the universe. Without a shared framework, communication is useless/impossible.

Seriously, though, while I'm of the opinion that people learn different things at different speeds, I have yet to encounter someone who was simply unable to grasp a mathematical concept or a concept in CS (not counting some people I know with debiliating mental illnesses).

The trick is to break it into smaller and smaller chunks of logic until people get it. As long as these people are capable of basic arithmetic, I think it's possible to make them 'get it'. And yes, teaching can be very hard.

Having said all that, I do agree with ^ that programming should not be mandatory.

Let's go back a few thousand years and ask Plato. Suppose he says "Literacy is not as basic of a skill as speaking and remembering. Proof is that it takes speaking and memory as foundational skills to read and write."

He's probably right for 500 BC. You could get by just fine without reading or writing. Literacy was for specialized purposes such as government record keeping. But society grew more sophisticated, to the point where, in the last century or two, it's hard to get a job or function on a basic level in society without being literate.

Well the world turns quicker and quicker. It used to be that one could get by on brute force mental work. But a mere 70 years after the first gigantic electronic computing machines, computational automation is becoming a necessary part of our lives. It may be possible to avoid it now, but it's getting less possible every day.

Abstract computation is a new way of processing and understanding information. It is the next stage in the evolution of information processing, beginning with spoken and then written language. It isn't on the same level as speaking and reading yet, but it's getting there, and we won't do our children any favors by letting them think it's optional.

I honestly don't know what to tell you. We can do the whole, "some people don't get it," "oh yeah, you just didn't teach it right," circular nonsense all day. I don't really care. All I can tell you is that I've been close to a number of people who would never be able to grasp programming in any meaningful way.

HN is an echo chamber of highly intelligent people, a disproportionate number of them in the Bay Area. I don't think HN participants have much of value to say about what people in general can and cannot do or understand.