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He's not saying everyone needs to be a programmer, but everyone needs to be able to program. The number of times in all my jobs where I've seen people working

He's not saying everyone needs to be a programmer, but everyone needs to be able to program. The number of times in all my jobs where I've seen people working on problems that could be done orders of magnitude faster with a bit of coding knowledge, is beyond count. Reformat that document? How about a Regex? Analyse this data? Automatic graph generation and statistical methods. Keep records updated? Database with automated queries. Always building weekly reports? Template substitution and HTML generation. There are so many jobs, that would not be considered anything to do with programming, that can be made hugely more efficient with a bit of coding knowledge. As this video says, for most of this you don't even need to know algorithms or data structures or the 'important' stuff for being a programmer. You just need to understand 'SELECT date FROM records WHERE quantity > 10'. Or 'println("Report Week Ending " + date.GetToday()))' Or 's/\[[A-Z]*\]/(&)/'

dagingaa 14y ago
In many cases the people in these positions don't even need to be able to program, they need to be able to see the solutions that programming can give them. I think this is the number one issue right now. Not everybody needs to be a programmer, but everyone needs to be educated about some of the ways programming can help you. With that said, we mostly come up with these ideas because we are able to program, so yeah.
ajasmin 14y ago
Domain specific languages have a role to play there. You already mentioned Regex and SQL but things like R, MathLab or even Excel can be invaluable tools in some professions.
argonaut 14y ago
Uh no. He's saying everyone needs to be a programmer. > companies will benefit most from hiring great coders and teaching them how to be CEOs
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  The problem is that today 'being able to read/write code' and 'being a programmer' is as good as synonym. It shouldn't be, that's the issue. We won't call CEOs with programming skills 'programmer's just as we don't call them 'readers' today.

dagingaa 14y ago

In many cases the people in these positions don't even need to be able to program, they need to be able to see the solutions that programming can give them. I think this is the number one issue right now. Not everybody needs to be a programmer, but everyone needs to be educated about some of the ways programming can help you. With that said, we mostly come up with these ideas because we are able to program, so yeah.

ajasmin 14y ago

Domain specific languages have a role to play there. You already mentioned Regex and SQL but things like R, MathLab or even Excel can be invaluable tools in some professions.

argonaut 14y ago

Uh no. He's saying everyone needs to be a programmer. > companies will benefit most from hiring great coders and teaching them how to be CEOs

DeepDuh 14y ago
The problem is that today 'being able to read/write code' and 'being a programmer' is as good as synonym. It shouldn't be, that's the issue. We won't call CEOs with programming skills 'programmer's just as we don't call them 'readers' today.