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I know I'll catch flak for this, but where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity, without delvi

I know I'll catch flak for this, but where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity, without delving into the capability side. What makes anyone think that they can take a bunch of people who never or barely passed highschool and have been working in a mine for a decade+ and teach them this? By all means subsidize a laptop and point them at some great online (free) resources, but beyond that if they won't/can't help themselves...

hirundo 7y ago
> Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity > By all means subsidize a laptop If you have a certain drive and curiosity for coding the price of a used low-end laptop is unlikely to be a significant barrier, when adequate new ones are available from Walmart for $159. I just found a 3 year old Chromebook on ebay for $57, or around 10 hours work at the federal minimum wage after taxes. And there's a salutary pride of ownership in earning it. I earned my first computer by working the grill at Burger King. Dreaming of what I'd buy with my wages made finally getting it particularly sweet.
- PorterDuff 7y ago
  Exactly. After years of getting highest-end company-supplied desktops, one of my holy missions is to reduce the cost of home computing. Typing on my eBay Chromebook, desktop box is a $35 i5 Optiplex running Qubes. There's better things to spend your money on.
- ip26 7y ago
  A wonderful world we live in. The best I could come up with as a kid was a used Xbox running Linux and a homemade VGA cable for something like $150. A then-modern machine for $50, I sure couldn't find one. (Of course adult-me is better at bargain-hunting)
- daveslash 7y ago
  To introduce people to the very most basic concepts of programming (if-then, loops, etc, and making hello-world, fizz-buzz, etc...), I've been using the javascript console in the Chrome (or Firefox) developer tools. In casual conversations with non developer friends (30-40 y/o), I'll say "here, pass me your laptop... " and I'll do fizz-buzz real quick. I haven't tried with any one, but I would think that teaching someone how to wrap their head around those concepts could be done with a cheap net-book and built-in browser development tools. In the beginning, get all of the dependencies out of the way - no need for a compiler, source control, package manager, etc....
detaro 7y ago
I think your last line goes to far in the other direction. You do not need to able to self-teach from zero to become a useful programmer, teaching can be very useful (but, as you rightly say, is no guarantee of success. Especially if done incredibly badly like the article suggests)
chomp 7y ago
To adapt a quote from one of my favorite movies: "Not everyone can become a great coder; but a great coder can come from anywhere." That's what (in my opinion) you should take away from "everybody can code." I think it's obvious that not every single person in the world has the external characteristics to be a great software developer. But those with passion and curiosity will be able to make a great career for themselves.
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  I think people got too hung up on "greatness" and some vague idea of "coding" as a kind of gold-rush job (pardon the pun). Could the school have instead focused on more boring general job skills with a special focus on using software effectively? I think so. I think it would have been more successful than teaching "the LAMP stack" or whatever it was they did. Not that software development is rocket science, but it's true that it's not for everybody, and neither is accounting, nursing, engineering, teaching or plumbing.
- 0x445442 7y ago
  The best Pixar movie IMHO.
  - ShamelessC 7y ago
    Which one is it?
    - 0x445442 7y ago
      Ratatouille
- throwaway413 7y ago
  Linguini, is that you?
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Why does everybody need to be “great”?
maxxxxx 7y ago
I don't get it either. A lot of people also would find coding as very tedious and boring. You have to be cut out for it.
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  I've found the hardest part about coding to be accepting that there isn't enough time in a single lifetime to learn it all. I may be close to learning that learning it all is not possible with infinite time, but I am not there yet :)
  - grigjd3 7y ago
    This is largely true in any field.
Kalium 7y ago
> where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? A better question, perhaps, is why this is assumed to equate to coding-based jobs. Anyone can learn to cook. This shouldn't be equated to everyone being equipped to become a chef de cuisine.
- ip26 7y ago
  At the same time, just because not everyone is chef de cuisine material, doesn't mean there's no point in their learning to cook. The theme in this comment thread seems to be something like, "Only rockstars should learn to code, it's pointless for normal people".
  - quantummkv 7y ago
    Yeah. but you should be honest about your skills and not bullcrap your way into being the chef in charge of preparing the pufferfish main course. That is a very deadly disaster. By all means learn to code and make programs for yourself. No issue in occasionally helping other projects or programs or doing some small scale work. But don't try to directly jump into big things before getting trained correctly.
  - maxheadroom 7y ago
    >At the same time, just because not everyone is chef de cuisine material, doesn't mean there's no point in their learning to cook. Cooking and coding aren't amalgamous. Cooking is necessary life skill, unless your only sources of sustenance are prepackaged foods or food from restaurants (which would include fast food). The same cannot be said for coding. You needn't know or even understand technology or software to use a cell phone or browse the internet or what-have-you. A more apt comparison would've probably been driving but even that is limited in scope, dependent on the public services available (which is, in and of itself, a byproduct of urban life versus rural life - at least in the states). Also, I think Hanlon's Razor applies here. The idea that everyone can make a stellar income from being a developer is oft touted as one of the points of these boot-camps. In other words, the argument is that those people can do it, it's just that they've never been afforded the opportunity. Whilst this might be true for a small percentage of the group, as a whole, it isn't - implicitly - true that all of them will find jobs being programmers the day after they graduate these camps. So, it isn't pointless for them to learn it, by far (and I'm only speaking for me, here), but it shouldn't be touted as the get-rich-quick-scheme that it's being pushed as because, then, yes, it's pointless for people to think it's possible to become a rockstar overnight; which I would like to point out is precisely what this business has capitalised on... To continue with the analogy of music, even rockstars had to play gigs and sell records/tapes as up & comers (negating the pop genre) before they became big. People only hear the songs on the radio, they don't want to hear about the years it took before those stars were even given spins on the radio (see: Jewel living out of her van).
fopen64 7y ago
Nobody cared about coding when there was no potential of making big bucks. It was something that geeks did. Now everybody wants a piece of the action.
kazinator 7y ago
> but where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? As a wild guess, it may partially be inspired by the idea that coding is done in languages, and, hey, people from all walks of life use language.
mises 7y ago
The idea came about when media pitched it as a solution to blue-collar jobs disappearing. This was particularly the case when some asked what would happen to coal miners when environmental regulations were enacted: they were told to learn to code. It was supposed to be a panacea for job loss.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  This feels like revisionist history to me. There have been more job losses in the print and publishing industry and there are more workers in the solar installation industry - the only reason why the coal miners get extra sympathy is because it’s politically expedient.
voidhorse 7y ago
I disagree. I think with the right levels of exposure at the early stages of education “coding” can become a proficiency just as common as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Of course, just like those skills, people will pursue programming to varying depths, some will determine to study advanced topics while others will remain “coders at the 6th grade level”. Not everyone will go into CS and develop new data structures, algorithms, or programming paradigms—but most people can and should be able to code solutions to well understood problems—just like mathematics this doesn’t mean everyone will know how to apply it in novel business situations, but just as most people can perform easy calculations they should be able to write straightforward programs. It’s all a matter of the appropriate cultural and educational scaffolding. Programming is still in its infancy and hasn’t permeated through the education system deeply enough yet to enshrine it as a core proficiency, but we can and should head in this directon.
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  In America anyways, coding "could" become a proficiency in the same way that business analysis "could" theoretically become a proficiency, but that is so thoroughly at odds with the American education system that I don't think it would happen unless there was a fundamental structural reformation of the entire system from the top down -- culturally, legally and probably generationally. As someone else in the thread said " Anyone can learn to cook. This shouldn't be equated to everyone being equipped to become a chef de cuisine." The fact that anyone can learn to cook only magnifies the detectable skill differential between a professional and an amateur, and I see no reason to see anything but the same pattern emerge with software construction.
- rahimnathwani 7y ago
  "I disagree. I think with the right levels of exposure at the early stages of education..." Right, but that doesn't help today's adults trying to switch careers, as they're past that stage. "just as most people can perform easy calculations" That's true by definition, i.e. you would only count a calculation as 'easy' if most people can perform it. But, based on the results of surveys like the 2015 FINRA financial capability survey, I guess that if you're talking about calculations that >50% of US adults can perform, you're excluding things that most readers of this site would consider 'easy', e.g.: "What happens if you start with 950, and it grows by 20% each year for 2 years?"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gingabriska 7y ago
I've no idea why coding should be anymore special than basic reading/writing skills. Code is a way to express solution to the problem which a computer can execute. If you can learn any language, you can learn coding too. Sure, not everyone can understand intricacies of the algorithm design and data structure gotchas but some of that can come as experience and curiousity. Question worth asking is that, does everyone need this special knowledge? And the answer is even many today working in the field know lot less than you would like them to know. Many websites have vunerabilities which can easily be solved by following some good practise. But still they are getting paid for that kind of work, which means there is a market for less knowledgeable developers who get the stuff done what's assigned to them even if they do not know how memory and processor works on the basic level. Today, it's lot easier to code with stackoverflow and GitHub at your disposal than ever.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  It’s the problem-solving, not the language part, that requires special aptitude. You might speak a dozen languages but it doesn’t help if you don’t know what to say. Besides, have you tried to learn a new natural language in adulthood? A bootcamp won’t get you far. And natural languages are really forgiving in comparison because you’re communicating with a human-level intelligence that’s used to inferring meaning from low-bandwidth ambiguous datastream.
  - gingabriska 7y ago
    How many times you come across a unique problem? Even when I come across a solution on my own, many times I find on stackoverflow or GitHub better designed solutions which address the corner cases which I didn't even think of.
  - ConnorLeet 7y ago
    Are problem solving skills something you are born with? To me the mismatch is that a traditional CS student spends more time practicing problem solving via homework and exam/exam prep.
5555624 7y ago
Because if you define "to code" as knowing the correct syntax for a given language, just about anyone can "learn to code." That does not mean they can write a program that solves a problem. That's a different skill set. It requires you to think and not simply look at a quick-reference card.
esoterica 7y ago
So you think you can code because you're a natural born genius with a special intelligence that other plebs don't have, and they will never catch up to you no matter how hard they try because their brains just ain't made right? That's not self serving and egotistic at all.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  I think I got a more wide interpretation to the GPs comment. It's certainly true that many people simply don't have the gumption for insert-any-particular-activity-here. For whatever reason. People try all sorts of activities only to realise they'd prefer doing other things. I'm fascinated by reading HN and the linked articles. I often read things I don't understand, but over time via resources available online, I've managed to maintain an evolving understanding of software development and the requisite technology. To put all of this knowledge in to the actual practice of writing software, would not only take many many hours > months > years to achieve basic competency, I'm genuinely not interested in doing that as a job, and think if I did force myself to learn programming I'd never make a particularly good one. Presumably there is room for mediocre developers, there definitely seems to be room for below-average-skilled people in every industry. I do agree that the last line probably takes it a bit too far. A not insignificant portion of people who could become okay a software development could do with a lot more help than laptop + search engine. Maybe a great schooling experience, accessible to all ages, to learn software development would go a long way. If it was a required subject at school I suspect there would be some people would do very poorly in that class, even if they had an amazing teacher.
Analemma_ 7y ago
> where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? From VC and business owner "thought leaders" who have an economic incentive to flood the market with programmers and drive down salaries. (Oops, I forgot we're not supposed to say that out loud...)
emilfihlman 7y ago
This right here. "Everyone can learn to do x" is a thing but when applied to coding the marketing is strong (compared to say mathematics or writing or dancing or construction). Yes, everyone can do it. No, not everyone can do it. These statements are funnily enough not mutually exclusive, they just apply different meanings to the words "can" (potential vs actual aptitude) and "do" (future vs presence).

hirundo 7y ago

> Coding requires a certain drive and curiosity > By all means subsidize a laptop If you have a certain drive and curiosity for coding the price of a used low-end laptop is unlikely to be a significant barrier, when adequate new ones are available from Walmart for $159. I just found a 3 year old Chromebook on ebay for $57, or around 10 hours work at the federal minimum wage after taxes. And there's a salutary pride of ownership in earning it. I earned my first computer by working the grill at Burger King. Dreaming of what I'd buy with my wages made finally getting it particularly sweet.

PorterDuff 7y ago
Exactly. After years of getting highest-end company-supplied desktops, one of my holy missions is to reduce the cost of home computing. Typing on my eBay Chromebook, desktop box is a $35 i5 Optiplex running Qubes. There's better things to spend your money on.
ip26 7y ago
A wonderful world we live in. The best I could come up with as a kid was a used Xbox running Linux and a homemade VGA cable for something like $150. A then-modern machine for $50, I sure couldn't find one. (Of course adult-me is better at bargain-hunting)
daveslash 7y ago
To introduce people to the very most basic concepts of programming (if-then, loops, etc, and making hello-world, fizz-buzz, etc...), I've been using the javascript console in the Chrome (or Firefox) developer tools. In casual conversations with non developer friends (30-40 y/o), I'll say "here, pass me your laptop... " and I'll do fizz-buzz real quick. I haven't tried with any one, but I would think that teaching someone how to wrap their head around those concepts could be done with a cheap net-book and built-in browser development tools. In the beginning, get all of the dependencies out of the way - no need for a compiler, source control, package manager, etc....

detaro 7y ago

I think your last line goes to far in the other direction. You do not need to able to self-teach from zero to become a useful programmer, teaching can be very useful (but, as you rightly say, is no guarantee of success. Especially if done incredibly badly like the article suggests)

chomp 7y ago

To adapt a quote from one of my favorite movies: "Not everyone can become a great coder; but a great coder can come from anywhere." That's what (in my opinion) you should take away from "everybody can code." I think it's obvious that not every single person in the world has the external characteristics to be a great software developer. But those with passion and curiosity will be able to make a great career for themselves.

crispyambulance 7y ago
I think people got too hung up on "greatness" and some vague idea of "coding" as a kind of gold-rush job (pardon the pun). Could the school have instead focused on more boring general job skills with a special focus on using software effectively? I think so. I think it would have been more successful than teaching "the LAMP stack" or whatever it was they did. Not that software development is rocket science, but it's true that it's not for everybody, and neither is accounting, nursing, engineering, teaching or plumbing.
0x445442 7y ago
The best Pixar movie IMHO.
- ShamelessC 7y ago
  Which one is it?
  - 0x445442 7y ago
    Ratatouille
throwaway413 7y ago
Linguini, is that you?
pmiller2 7y ago
Why does everybody need to be “great”?

maxxxxx 7y ago

I don't get it either. A lot of people also would find coding as very tedious and boring. You have to be cut out for it.

PopeDotNinja 7y ago
I've found the hardest part about coding to be accepting that there isn't enough time in a single lifetime to learn it all. I may be close to learning that learning it all is not possible with infinite time, but I am not there yet :)
- grigjd3 7y ago
  This is largely true in any field.

Kalium 7y ago

> where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? A better question, perhaps, is why this is assumed to equate to coding-based jobs. Anyone can learn to cook. This shouldn't be equated to everyone being equipped to become a chef de cuisine.

ip26 7y ago
At the same time, just because not everyone is chef de cuisine material, doesn't mean there's no point in their learning to cook. The theme in this comment thread seems to be something like, "Only rockstars should learn to code, it's pointless for normal people".
- quantummkv 7y ago
  Yeah. but you should be honest about your skills and not bullcrap your way into being the chef in charge of preparing the pufferfish main course. That is a very deadly disaster. By all means learn to code and make programs for yourself. No issue in occasionally helping other projects or programs or doing some small scale work. But don't try to directly jump into big things before getting trained correctly.
- maxheadroom 7y ago
  >At the same time, just because not everyone is chef de cuisine material, doesn't mean there's no point in their learning to cook. Cooking and coding aren't amalgamous. Cooking is necessary life skill, unless your only sources of sustenance are prepackaged foods or food from restaurants (which would include fast food). The same cannot be said for coding. You needn't know or even understand technology or software to use a cell phone or browse the internet or what-have-you. A more apt comparison would've probably been driving but even that is limited in scope, dependent on the public services available (which is, in and of itself, a byproduct of urban life versus rural life - at least in the states). Also, I think Hanlon's Razor applies here. The idea that everyone can make a stellar income from being a developer is oft touted as one of the points of these boot-camps. In other words, the argument is that those people can do it, it's just that they've never been afforded the opportunity. Whilst this might be true for a small percentage of the group, as a whole, it isn't - implicitly - true that all of them will find jobs being programmers the day after they graduate these camps. So, it isn't pointless for them to learn it, by far (and I'm only speaking for me, here), but it shouldn't be touted as the get-rich-quick-scheme that it's being pushed as because, then, yes, it's pointless for people to think it's possible to become a rockstar overnight; which I would like to point out is precisely what this business has capitalised on... To continue with the analogy of music, even rockstars had to play gigs and sell records/tapes as up & comers (negating the pop genre) before they became big. People only hear the songs on the radio, they don't want to hear about the years it took before those stars were even given spins on the radio (see: Jewel living out of her van).

fopen64 7y ago

Nobody cared about coding when there was no potential of making big bucks. It was something that geeks did. Now everybody wants a piece of the action.

kazinator 7y ago

> but where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? As a wild guess, it may partially be inspired by the idea that coding is done in languages, and, hey, people from all walks of life use language.

mises 7y ago

The idea came about when media pitched it as a solution to blue-collar jobs disappearing. This was particularly the case when some asked what would happen to coal miners when environmental regulations were enacted: they were told to learn to code. It was supposed to be a panacea for job loss.

akhilcacharya 7y ago
This feels like revisionist history to me. There have been more job losses in the print and publishing industry and there are more workers in the solar installation industry - the only reason why the coal miners get extra sympathy is because it’s politically expedient.

voidhorse 7y ago

I disagree. I think with the right levels of exposure at the early stages of education “coding” can become a proficiency just as common as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Of course, just like those skills, people will pursue programming to varying depths, some will determine to study advanced topics while others will remain “coders at the 6th grade level”. Not everyone will go into CS and develop new data structures, algorithms, or programming paradigms—but most people can and should be able to code solutions to well understood problems—just like mathematics this doesn’t mean everyone will know how to apply it in novel business situations, but just as most people can perform easy calculations they should be able to write straightforward programs. It’s all a matter of the appropriate cultural and educational scaffolding. Programming is still in its infancy and hasn’t permeated through the education system deeply enough yet to enshrine it as a core proficiency, but we can and should head in this directon.

yowlingcat 7y ago
In America anyways, coding "could" become a proficiency in the same way that business analysis "could" theoretically become a proficiency, but that is so thoroughly at odds with the American education system that I don't think it would happen unless there was a fundamental structural reformation of the entire system from the top down -- culturally, legally and probably generationally. As someone else in the thread said " Anyone can learn to cook. This shouldn't be equated to everyone being equipped to become a chef de cuisine." The fact that anyone can learn to cook only magnifies the detectable skill differential between a professional and an amateur, and I see no reason to see anything but the same pattern emerge with software construction.
rahimnathwani 7y ago
"I disagree. I think with the right levels of exposure at the early stages of education..." Right, but that doesn't help today's adults trying to switch careers, as they're past that stage. "just as most people can perform easy calculations" That's true by definition, i.e. you would only count a calculation as 'easy' if most people can perform it. But, based on the results of surveys like the 2015 FINRA financial capability survey, I guess that if you're talking about calculations that >50% of US adults can perform, you're excluding things that most readers of this site would consider 'easy', e.g.: "What happens if you start with 950, and it grows by 20% each year for 2 years?"

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

gingabriska 7y ago

I've no idea why coding should be anymore special than basic reading/writing skills. Code is a way to express solution to the problem which a computer can execute. If you can learn any language, you can learn coding too. Sure, not everyone can understand intricacies of the algorithm design and data structure gotchas but some of that can come as experience and curiousity. Question worth asking is that, does everyone need this special knowledge? And the answer is even many today working in the field know lot less than you would like them to know. Many websites have vunerabilities which can easily be solved by following some good practise. But still they are getting paid for that kind of work, which means there is a market for less knowledgeable developers who get the stuff done what's assigned to them even if they do not know how memory and processor works on the basic level. Today, it's lot easier to code with stackoverflow and GitHub at your disposal than ever.

Sharlin 7y ago
It’s the problem-solving, not the language part, that requires special aptitude. You might speak a dozen languages but it doesn’t help if you don’t know what to say. Besides, have you tried to learn a new natural language in adulthood? A bootcamp won’t get you far. And natural languages are really forgiving in comparison because you’re communicating with a human-level intelligence that’s used to inferring meaning from low-bandwidth ambiguous datastream.
- gingabriska 7y ago
  How many times you come across a unique problem? Even when I come across a solution on my own, many times I find on stackoverflow or GitHub better designed solutions which address the corner cases which I didn't even think of.
- ConnorLeet 7y ago
  Are problem solving skills something you are born with? To me the mismatch is that a traditional CS student spends more time practicing problem solving via homework and exam/exam prep.

5555624 7y ago

Because if you define "to code" as knowing the correct syntax for a given language, just about anyone can "learn to code." That does not mean they can write a program that solves a problem. That's a different skill set. It requires you to think and not simply look at a quick-reference card.

esoterica 7y ago

So you think you can code because you're a natural born genius with a special intelligence that other plebs don't have, and they will never catch up to you no matter how hard they try because their brains just ain't made right? That's not self serving and egotistic at all.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
I think I got a more wide interpretation to the GPs comment. It's certainly true that many people simply don't have the gumption for insert-any-particular-activity-here. For whatever reason. People try all sorts of activities only to realise they'd prefer doing other things. I'm fascinated by reading HN and the linked articles. I often read things I don't understand, but over time via resources available online, I've managed to maintain an evolving understanding of software development and the requisite technology. To put all of this knowledge in to the actual practice of writing software, would not only take many many hours > months > years to achieve basic competency, I'm genuinely not interested in doing that as a job, and think if I did force myself to learn programming I'd never make a particularly good one. Presumably there is room for mediocre developers, there definitely seems to be room for below-average-skilled people in every industry. I do agree that the last line probably takes it a bit too far. A not insignificant portion of people who could become okay a software development could do with a lot more help than laptop + search engine. Maybe a great schooling experience, accessible to all ages, to learn software development would go a long way. If it was a required subject at school I suspect there would be some people would do very poorly in that class, even if they had an amazing teacher.

Analemma_ 7y ago

> where did this idea that "anyone can learn to code" come from? From VC and business owner "thought leaders" who have an economic incentive to flood the market with programmers and drive down salaries. (Oops, I forgot we're not supposed to say that out loud...)

emilfihlman 7y ago

This right here. "Everyone can learn to do x" is a thing but when applied to coding the marketing is strong (compared to say mathematics or writing or dancing or construction). Yes, everyone can do it. No, not everyone can do it. These statements are funnily enough not mutually exclusive, they just apply different meanings to the words "can" (potential vs actual aptitude) and "do" (future vs presence).