Because filling the road with half-accomplished drivers is a pain in the derriere. The average driver is already annoyed and tense on the road, I can only imagi

Because filling the road with half-accomplished drivers is a pain in the derriere. The average driver is already annoyed and tense on the road, I can only imagine professional drivers get very frustrated by poor driving when they're outside the tracks. (On a side note, driving is much more vital than programming, so the analogy stops here. You should have the right to drive, even at a non-professional level. Can the same be said of programming?) Just like less-than-average drivers will annoy the pros, the less-than-average programmer will limit the field. If you look at my original comment, I clearly mentioned: "How to make the real programmer on your team miserable". If the less-than-average programmer sits in his parents basement working on his own racoon-loving social network using the most mind numbing technologies, that's okay. But as soon as he interacts with others, he will inevitably cripple the advances of the field. Think of what happens each time a standard comittee reaches the conclusion: "It's a great idea, but too complex for people to grasp". I know I sound very elitist, and I wish I wasn't. The truth is programming is hard. Very, very hard. Sure you can use your favorite framework to generate an html form and read DB fields, but this is not programming. Dijkstra has written extensively about the subject, calling programming "one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics" or saying about BASIC (whose usage then is very analogous to the subject at hand now) "the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery". EWD was an extremist, he argued that CS students should focus on symbol manipulations, prohibiting them to manipulate computers for the first few years, focusing on an abstract formal language instead. He criticized universities for "[lacking] the courage to teach hard science" and their "infantilization" of the "radically new" idea that is computer science. I won't go as far. If what he suggests is an extreme, a website promising you to learn code in 3 months is the opposite extreme. A 4 year CS degree, a couple of open source projects and the deliberative practice Norvig talked about should be a good moderate middle-ground. In short, do I encourage people to start programming? Of course I do, it's the most fun I've ever had in my life. Do I agree that three months worth of learning and couple of RoR pre-fabricated functions is enough to say they learned how to "code"? Absolutely not.