I’m sorry you hear my comment as championing gatekeeping. That’s not my point at all. I want to champion spending time to slowly get good at things. Celebrate a

I’m sorry you hear my comment as championing gatekeeping. That’s not my point at all. I want to champion spending time to slowly get good at things. Celebrate all the people who didn’t put out a hit single the first time they picked up a guitar. I think we only get really good at programming if we put the time in for years. Of course I want more beginners programming. How else would they become experts? Years of practice happen one day at a time. I was one of those kids you’re talking about, who learned programming on my own from about the age of 9. That was 30 years ago, and I’ve gotten a lot better at it since then. Sometimes I talk to people who have less experience than I do, and I’ve seen the life go out of peoples eyes when they think they aren’t as “talented” as I am. Hah! You see me now, but you don’t see the 30 years of work I’ve put in to get here! I think this whole “neophytes can do anything” philosophy of yours is toxic, because people assume that if you’re good at programming, you were born good at programming. If they weren’t born like that, they feel inadequate and attack themselves. You’re wrong. That’s not how it works. It’s great that someone can throw together a website in your first week of a bootcamp. Welcome to the starting line. Maybe that’s enough to start a successful business. But that’s not a sign you’re an expert yet. And thank goodness for that! As piano is teaching me all over again, watching yourself improve slowly over years of practice is a truly wonderful experience. An expert at programming can make a website - sure. Or they can edit the code in their web browser. Or write their own webpack, or react. Or invent a new programming language and compile it to webassembly. Or write an http2 proxy to make their page go faster. Or 1000 other weird things. How cool is that! Why on earth would you make expertise into a dirty word? Seriously - what’s wrong with people.