I mostly agree with Jeff here, although I do think it's good for people to learn more about technology and the Internet. But it's more helpful to learn things a

I mostly agree with Jeff here, although I do think it's good for people to learn more about technology and the Internet. But it's more helpful to learn things at a higher level than code. I recently gave a talk to some Wharton entrepreneurs about web architecture, and I started with the "learn to code" movement. My slides are here: http://wharton-vip-webapps-talk.heroku.com/slides/1 http://wharton-vip-webapps-talk.heroku.com/slides/1 To a lot of people (and in the context of my talk, everyone), "learn to code" doesn't mean starting a fun hobby; it means building an MVP. In my talk, I gave several reasons why programming is rewarding and fun, but I also said if you're a business person, doing it yourself might not be the best business decision. The third slide at that URL makes the point that to build the full stack of a Rails application actually requires mastering quite a lot of technologies (fewer if you deploy in a PaaS, of course).