I'm currently in medical school, so I think my opinion might provide another perspective on this. As others have pointed out in this thread, the incentives beh

I'm currently in medical school, so I think my opinion might provide another perspective on this. As others have pointed out in this thread, the incentives behind folks pushing the "learn to code" idea are varied: some people want more engineers to hire and some people want to sell to those learning to code. These seem like reasonable criticisms, but I think they miss the point. Many of you, if not most, are in the software industry. You try to solve interesting problems every day, or, at least, you'd like to. Every industry and every field has the need to solve them, at least with my definition of 'interesting'. Solving such a problem is difficult. It requires knowing very clearly about the rules of engagement, and mapping out strategies for tackling the issue. It requires an understanding of the lay of the land, but also the capacity to think outside the box. In short, it is exactly what all of you would expect from a 'good' programmer - the ability to think actively. You'll notice that I make no claims of this sort about physicians. The best doctors may do these things, but most doctors don't. And at the very least, doctors certainly are not trained in ways of solving problems effectively. Instead, we are mostly trained in pattern recognition. So what? Do I think a doctor would benefit from learning to program? Yes. Because figuring out how to writing a complex program is not so different from doing a complex surgery. Understanding algorithms is not so different from producing a good differential diagnosis. Most importantly, if we want to solve big problems we can't always rely on an engineer from the outside looking in and solving it for us. Programming forces you to explain your understanding to something that is very stupid (in a way). If you don't understand what you're doing, your program doesn't work. That basic check doesn't exist for doctors. Ask your doctor what a graph of y = 1/x looks like. Then ask him to graph alveolar CO2 vs ventilation. You should be really afraid of how many doctors only know the latter. I would guess some of them even wouldn't know that! (but they probably know what to do with a patient who's hyperventilating, because they'd memorized it) Programming is the means to the end, not the end. All this talk of APIs and IDEs and C vs Python vs Javascript really seem to miss the bigger picture here. The best way we have of teaching thinking is with programming (IMHO) and there has to be a way of teaching programming by getting all of the annoying crap out of the way. And we desperately do need more people who have the capacity to think and solve problems. Maybe not will.i.am or Chris Bosh or even software junkies in the valley, but definitely in every other industry. EDIT: small grammar edit, no content change.