>Being a programmer doesn't help me troubleshoot Windows or get my printer working. I think that is partly an artifact of closed source OSes. When I used OS X,

>Being a programmer doesn't help me troubleshoot Windows or get my printer working. I think that is partly an artifact of closed source OSes. When I used OS X, I almost never fixed a problem with programming (other than a problem like "I don't have a program to do this"). Having switched to Ubuntu, I actually have found programming to be a useful way to work around problems. Sometimes there's a "right" way that involves digging through documentation to find some random option, and an easy way that involves writing a shell script. >It's not a generally useful skill like riding a bike is. I totally disagree. It's not as useful as riding a bike, but it's certainly useful even when not used professionally. I recently was working out a recipe for a "one food to rule them all" inspired by soylent, and I wrote a program to calculate the ingredient proportions. It had nothing to do with professional programming, and it was incredibly useful.