I see Jeff's point. Don't turn a bunch of people into coders that aren't ready for it. You'll just dilute the brand, and right now being a coder is valued tod

I see Jeff's point. Don't turn a bunch of people into coders that aren't ready for it. You'll just dilute the brand, and right now being a coder is valued today for whole host of reasons. As evidence of the faked resume scandal at yahoo. It's cool, but there will be a day when it goes back to being very uncool. And doing things like what Jeff is rallying against will help drive us there. On the other hand non-coders want to understand what we do and how we do it. Just like I find watching construction workers build things or a plumber fix things. Its fun. 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.