Jeff's irritation here comes as as ignorance. The PR value alone of the Mayor of NYC learning to program could potentially inspire thousands of new casual coder

Jeff's irritation here comes as as ignorance. The PR value alone of the Mayor of NYC learning to program could potentially inspire thousands of new casual coders and hundreds of new programmers. There is nothing wrong with wanting to learn how to create something. Ultimately, many thousands of Americans learn a little bit of plumbing for home improvement projects and they're generally happy with it. It's no different to learn a little bit of coding for building a dynamic website for your community group, even if it's as simple as using HTML, CSS, and Javascript to customize a Drupal or Wordpress site, for example. In fact, you couldn't pick a more appropriate language than Javascript and markup languages for beginners looking to make something useful. We're not asking them to write linked lists or handle correct use of object inheritance.