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I completely disagree. Having everyone knowing how to code is the opposite of specialisation. It's inefficient and pointless. If a certain profession needs a p

I completely disagree. Having everyone knowing how to code is the opposite of specialisation. It's inefficient and pointless. If a certain profession needs a piece of software, it's much more efficient for specialist developers to consult with domain experts, write that software, and sell it into the industry. Having every (for example) doctor being able to code adds negligible value, and I would argue the opportunity cost is awful. If my doctor has a choice to become a very mediocre coder or a better doctor, I would hope they choose the latter. As for the comparison to literacy, there's simply no comparison. Illiterate societies are unable to progress past agrarian economies because illiteracy precludes specialisation, prevents the dissemination of knowledge, and makes it almost impossible to learn new things except by imitation or direct instruction. Literacy is a necessary skill in order to do much beyond dirt farming. Illiterate people can't, for example, even follow a moderately complex checklist. In contrast, I see no negative impact on society if most people can't code. I don't spend my time studying anatomy; my micro-surgeon shouldn't spend his time studying coding, and I don't see how it would do anything but make him less effective if he did. A society of part-time coders would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written toy programs. What's the point?

gohrt 12y ago
> A society of part-time coders would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written toy programs. What's the point? Maybe you are embarassed by the content of github, but many of us feel it is changing the word for the better. An Excel jockey writing macros -> better spreadsheets. A writer who can analyze and restructure their story, wihout laboriously poring and cutting and pasting -> better stories. There was a time when 'writing' was a specialist activity best left to professionals. Imagine if that never changed? We don't need everyone to be an anatomist, but certainly we should all know enough about our own bodies to feed and exercise them properly. I hope we never live in a world where we only eat what The Nutritionist hands to us, and we only move our bodies in the way The Physiologist instructs us.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  A writer who can analyze and restructure their story, wihout laboriously poring and cutting and pasting -> better stories. How is this related to knowing how to code?
- kimdouglasmason 12y ago
  I didn't mention github, and don't see it as especially relevant. If you are an 'excel jockey', then your job involves coding. Of course knowing how to code to some degree will make you better. I don't see that as a good example. You should have used one of the many professions that currently involve no coding at all as an example. There was also a time when civil engineering was a specialist activity best left to professionals, and it still is. You seem to believe that coding is akin to literacy. I believe it is not, and have provided some reasons in my previous post.
  - enraged_camel 12y ago
    >>You should have used one of the many professions that currently involve no coding at all as an example. Okay, I'll bite. My dad is an ophthalmologist in Turkey. He runs his own private practice. When he opened the clinic in the early 90s, he quickly realized that keeping track of patient records in paper format was not efficient. So he taught himself Microsoft Access (which came out in 1992!) and wrote his own patient record management software, which greatly increased his productivity and therefore income/leisure time. Fast-forward to 2011. I was organizing an international conference and needed to send out some email blasts. The problem was, all the email addresses I needed were on a several hundred page PDF document with no clear format. So I had a choice: I could spend days manually copy-pasting and cleaning stuff up, or I could try to automate it. I ended up writing a Ruby script that grabbed the embedded text and pattern-matched email addresses and spat them out onto a text file. Still not perfect (my regex was rudimentary) but it got the job done a lot faster. Learning basic Ruby took me several hours, and I ran into some (silly) issues [1], but that's still better than the several days I would have spent doing the task manually. You may be thinking, "well, we have specialists for that sort of thing today." Sure. But just like there are many rural areas in the US where it doesn't make economic sense for ISPs to lay out fiber, there are many personal tasks and errands where it doesn't make sense for professional developers to write software for. So there is a lot to be said for the need for individual empowerment through programming. [1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6566884/rubys-file-open-gives-no-such-file-or-directory-text-txt-errnoenoent-er http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6566884/rubys-file-open-g...
    - 12y ago
- pakitan 12y ago
  > There was a time when 'writing' was a specialist activity best left to professionals. Imagine if that never changed? Writing = thoughts put on paper. When writing was a "specialist" activity it was due mostly to technical difficulties rather than people needing a whole new breed of skills. The anatomist analogy is a good one. But if we extend it to IT, it doesn't mean everybody should be able to program. Rather, everybody should know basic computer operation and how to use the most popular programs.
  - scotty79 12y ago
    Programming = putting thoughts into computers in executable form. I think all people should learn how to make computer do their bidding at a rate more than one click at a time.
    - pakitan 12y ago
      Don't stop there. Architecture = putting thoughts in a "virtual building" form. Therefore everyone should learn how to design their own house. Seriously, you're making quite the jump putting writing on the same level as programming.
    - ryanpardieck 12y ago
      More importantly, writing is an important mode of communication in a way programming will never be (and programming shouldn't be expected to be that). Penpals don't mail source code back and forth to each other. Thinking knowing to code is as important as literacy is just another version of people thinking their specific profession is super-important because it's what they spend their time doing. I imagine some especially pompous auto mechanics think knowing the internals of a car is as important as reading and writing. (Though, I imagine there are much fewer pompous auto mechanics than pompous hackers.)
wanderingstan 12y ago
Someone a thousand years ago would have dictated to his scribe the following: "Having everyone knowing how to read and write is the opposite of specialisation. It's inefficient and pointless. If a certain profession needs a document, it's much more efficient for specialist scribes to consult with domain experts, write that document, and sell it into the industry. Having every (for example) doctor being able to read and write adds negligible value, and I would argue the opportunity cost is awful. If my doctor has a choice to become a very mediocre writer or a better doctor, I would hope they choose the latter. A society of part-time readers and writers would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written texts. What's the point?" The comparison with literacy is incredibly apt. Even though very few of us moderns are professional writers, we all benefit by knowing the basic abstractions of letters and words. In the future, everyone will benefit from knowing basics of computation. Probably in ways we can't imagine now, just as an ancient Egyptian scribe could not have conceived of "commoners" writing YouTube comments or texting "whatup u?" to a friend.
- kimdouglasmason 12y ago
  I explained why comparing coding to literacy in my post is a false equivalence. It's nice to see that you completely ignored that part.
- TheEzEzz 12y ago
  This is an alluring retort, but I have to agree with kimdouglasmason that it has no actual weight. kimdouglasmason explains and gives examples of why literacy has had such a huge impact on the world. You give no examples of how code literacy will have similar impacts. You just make an analogy and say it will affect the world "in ways we can't imagine". Your argument could just as easily apply to electrical engineering. The whole world runs on electricity, how is it that no one knows Maxwell's equations! Everyone should obtain basic proficiency in applying electromagnetic theory: it will help the world in ways we can't imagine now.
  - webmaven 12y ago
    The electrical equivalent of everyone knowing the basics of computation isn't 'understanding maxwells equations' it is being able to wire up a battery and a light bulb.
hershel 12y ago
> a lot of badly-written toy programs. That's not necessarily true. On some panel about python, one of the participants who teaches python to science students said that after their relatively short amount of training, scientists can do useful stuff with python and that resonated well within the panel.
- kimdouglasmason 12y ago
  This is another example of a field where coding is relevant to the job. Many current scientific methods involve heavy use of computers for things like simulation, complex calculation, or control of custom built equipment. I still maintain there are many professions where coding is almost completely irrelevant. Some scientists use general purpose programming languages as part of their work. No (for example) physical therapist does this as part of their work. Many people on this board also seem to underestimate just how difficult it can be to learn to code for many people who have skills in other areas. People who are studying science are probably the type who are good at coding. If you want to see how difficult coding is for many, just look at the drop-out rates in Computer Science 1. The general argument that I am responding to is that coding is comparable to literacy. I argue that both in need and applicability, it simply is not. If you are illiterate, the number one thing you can generally do to improve your life is learn to read. I argue that unlike literacy, there are many professions where learning how to code provides less benefit than spending that effort learning or doing something else.
  - hershel 12y ago
    I agree , but those same claims are true for many subjects learned at school, for example math.
  - leot 12y ago
    Much of your thesis relies on the following: > If you are illiterate, the number one thing you can generally do to improve your life is learn to read. I agree that this certainly holds true today, since our culture now uses reading through and through. But in the history of our species, literacy is the weird exception, not the norm. For your argument to hold, it needs to have been true when only, say, 3% of the population could read and write (basically, a proportion comparable to today's proportion of people who "know how to code"). This graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png) suggests that the comparable era may be sometime around the medieval period, and it's not at all clear that your thesis would obviously hold true then, when other skills (hunting, barrel making, blacksmithing, etc.) would be far more immediately remunerative. When books are scarce, and few of one's peers are literate, being literate will do far less to improve one's life.
leot 12y ago
Implicit in what you've written is the idea that humanity has reached some kind of end state in contemporary modernity. Yet given the accelerating pace of change, when the humans of 200 years from now look back on us, they'll undoubtedly see us as even more primitive and different than humans from the 1800s do to us today. Future-humans might even lament how poor and stuck we all were, perhaps in large part because so few of us could program. Illiterate societies indeed tend to not progress, and humanity at the moment has massive problems that it shows little evidence of being able to contend with. You're completely right that existing professions, as currently practiced, benefit little from adding to them an ability to program. Yet we're seeing a massive trend away from many current professions, as currently practiced. Many jobs are getting automated out of existence[1]. The chief culprit? Software. [1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594298-effect-todays-technology-tomorrows-jobs-will-be-immenseand-no-country-ready http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594298-effect-todays...
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
Instead of looking for the negative impact on society, have you tried looking for the possible positive impact _if_ everyone knew basic CS and programming? I see that those should logically be isomorphic, but I think the way you frame the question makes a big difference as to what you will discover. I think literacy is a very good comparison. Society certainly did work without everyone being literate, with just a few specialists who knew how to read and write, and there was no obvious need for everyone to learn it, and it is a huge investment of time and effort for everyone who has to go through it, so it would seem like a natural candidate for specialization, wouldn't it? Yet, as you note, essentially universal literacy has transformed the way we live massively for the better, and few would argue that this massive investment of every single person is not worth it and we should return to specialists taking care of our reading and writing. Now, the question is: What would a society with universal knowledge of CS and programming basics look like? What would future kimdouglasmasons say when they claim that some new skill is not worth teaching to everybody because there simply is no comparison to computationality? How were pre-computational societies fundamentally held back in their progress, what kind of fundamental transformations of society would never have been possible if people had stayed uncomputational? Your example isn't particularly helpful. Anatomy is not a widely applicable set of skills. There never is any question of whether you could use the help of an anatomist to help you solve an anatomy problem with your new motor design or your new soup recipe. Automated computation, much like literacy, essentially can be applied everywhere. That's why you write "it's much more efficient for specialist developers to consult with domain experts". That sentence only makes sense for universally applicable skills - I doubt many anatomists often consult with domain experts because they need to apply their knowledge in a field they so far have no clue of. Also, the grocery lists a literate society writes also aren't of particular literary value. That does not mean that society isn't better of for people being able to write them. And to appreciate more the works of those who still are "literacy professionals", who obviously still have their place in society.
zanny 12y ago
> write that software, and sell it into the industry I hope by this you mean start a collective open standards FOSS project to fill the need, rather than write proprietary software that every single firm will redundantly reproduce because nobody wants to embrace the information age. That is the same kind of backwards redundancy that highlights why "everyone coding" is a bad idea. > I would hope they choose the later Medicine is rapidly being transformed by AI, robotics, and automation. In decades we should see the complete replacement of human labor in many surgical procedures, since a programmed machine can be much more precise and interpret the bodies signals and vitals in much greater clarity. But do you want doctors, the experts on performing these procedures, writing the code, or do you you want programmers who know to ironlad it against unexpected behavior to write the code? (trick question, we want both, but the doctors need to be computer literate and the programmers medically literate, but usually the later is more true than the former). I think there is a misnomer equating computer literacy with writing software. The latter can give the former, but it doesn't always happen - I know many SEs who can't point out a hard drive from RAM, and couldn't make heads or tails of problems out of their niche domain. That isn't really computer literacy either, even if they live in a deep crevase within it. I think computer literacy, as others in this thread have pointed out, should be its own course - just like English literature. You want to convey the macroscopic concepts and motivations and overarching conventions, rather than the minute details. The analogy would be do you care about sentence structure, word density, and subliminal messaging in Lit 101 - well, no, you care about overarching plot and meaning. Any computer literacy class should have a cirriculum teaching its students what code is, but that doesn't mean they need to know how to write it. They should just understand how the machines in their day to day lives work, and how to control them if they want to from there. Because so many people are misinformed or just ignorant about what these magical glowy screens of letters and pictures actually are to begin with. It is the difference between being able to appreciate literature and being able to write world class novels.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>A society of part-time coders would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written toy programs. What's the point? If I may extend the previous metaphor: society already produces fanfiction.net, so I think we'll survive this too.

gohrt 12y ago

> A society of part-time coders would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written toy programs. What's the point? Maybe you are embarassed by the content of github, but many of us feel it is changing the word for the better. An Excel jockey writing macros -> better spreadsheets. A writer who can analyze and restructure their story, wihout laboriously poring and cutting and pasting -> better stories. There was a time when 'writing' was a specialist activity best left to professionals. Imagine if that never changed? We don't need everyone to be an anatomist, but certainly we should all know enough about our own bodies to feed and exercise them properly. I hope we never live in a world where we only eat what The Nutritionist hands to us, and we only move our bodies in the way The Physiologist instructs us.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
A writer who can analyze and restructure their story, wihout laboriously poring and cutting and pasting -> better stories. How is this related to knowing how to code?
kimdouglasmason 12y ago
I didn't mention github, and don't see it as especially relevant. If you are an 'excel jockey', then your job involves coding. Of course knowing how to code to some degree will make you better. I don't see that as a good example. You should have used one of the many professions that currently involve no coding at all as an example. There was also a time when civil engineering was a specialist activity best left to professionals, and it still is. You seem to believe that coding is akin to literacy. I believe it is not, and have provided some reasons in my previous post.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  >>You should have used one of the many professions that currently involve no coding at all as an example. Okay, I'll bite. My dad is an ophthalmologist in Turkey. He runs his own private practice. When he opened the clinic in the early 90s, he quickly realized that keeping track of patient records in paper format was not efficient. So he taught himself Microsoft Access (which came out in 1992!) and wrote his own patient record management software, which greatly increased his productivity and therefore income/leisure time. Fast-forward to 2011. I was organizing an international conference and needed to send out some email blasts. The problem was, all the email addresses I needed were on a several hundred page PDF document with no clear format. So I had a choice: I could spend days manually copy-pasting and cleaning stuff up, or I could try to automate it. I ended up writing a Ruby script that grabbed the embedded text and pattern-matched email addresses and spat them out onto a text file. Still not perfect (my regex was rudimentary) but it got the job done a lot faster. Learning basic Ruby took me several hours, and I ran into some (silly) issues [1], but that's still better than the several days I would have spent doing the task manually. You may be thinking, "well, we have specialists for that sort of thing today." Sure. But just like there are many rural areas in the US where it doesn't make economic sense for ISPs to lay out fiber, there are many personal tasks and errands where it doesn't make sense for professional developers to write software for. So there is a lot to be said for the need for individual empowerment through programming. [1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6566884/rubys-file-open-gives-no-such-file-or-directory-text-txt-errnoenoent-er http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6566884/rubys-file-open-g...
  - 12y ago
pakitan 12y ago
> There was a time when 'writing' was a specialist activity best left to professionals. Imagine if that never changed? Writing = thoughts put on paper. When writing was a "specialist" activity it was due mostly to technical difficulties rather than people needing a whole new breed of skills. The anatomist analogy is a good one. But if we extend it to IT, it doesn't mean everybody should be able to program. Rather, everybody should know basic computer operation and how to use the most popular programs.
- scotty79 12y ago
  Programming = putting thoughts into computers in executable form. I think all people should learn how to make computer do their bidding at a rate more than one click at a time.
  - pakitan 12y ago
    Don't stop there. Architecture = putting thoughts in a "virtual building" form. Therefore everyone should learn how to design their own house. Seriously, you're making quite the jump putting writing on the same level as programming.
  - ryanpardieck 12y ago
    More importantly, writing is an important mode of communication in a way programming will never be (and programming shouldn't be expected to be that). Penpals don't mail source code back and forth to each other. Thinking knowing to code is as important as literacy is just another version of people thinking their specific profession is super-important because it's what they spend their time doing. I imagine some especially pompous auto mechanics think knowing the internals of a car is as important as reading and writing. (Though, I imagine there are much fewer pompous auto mechanics than pompous hackers.)

wanderingstan 12y ago

Someone a thousand years ago would have dictated to his scribe the following: "Having everyone knowing how to read and write is the opposite of specialisation. It's inefficient and pointless. If a certain profession needs a document, it's much more efficient for specialist scribes to consult with domain experts, write that document, and sell it into the industry. Having every (for example) doctor being able to read and write adds negligible value, and I would argue the opportunity cost is awful. If my doctor has a choice to become a very mediocre writer or a better doctor, I would hope they choose the latter. A society of part-time readers and writers would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written texts. What's the point?" The comparison with literacy is incredibly apt. Even though very few of us moderns are professional writers, we all benefit by knowing the basic abstractions of letters and words. In the future, everyone will benefit from knowing basics of computation. Probably in ways we can't imagine now, just as an ancient Egyptian scribe could not have conceived of "commoners" writing YouTube comments or texting "whatup u?" to a friend.

kimdouglasmason 12y ago
I explained why comparing coding to literacy in my post is a false equivalence. It's nice to see that you completely ignored that part.
TheEzEzz 12y ago
This is an alluring retort, but I have to agree with kimdouglasmason that it has no actual weight. kimdouglasmason explains and gives examples of why literacy has had such a huge impact on the world. You give no examples of how code literacy will have similar impacts. You just make an analogy and say it will affect the world "in ways we can't imagine". Your argument could just as easily apply to electrical engineering. The whole world runs on electricity, how is it that no one knows Maxwell's equations! Everyone should obtain basic proficiency in applying electromagnetic theory: it will help the world in ways we can't imagine now.
- webmaven 12y ago
  The electrical equivalent of everyone knowing the basics of computation isn't 'understanding maxwells equations' it is being able to wire up a battery and a light bulb.

hershel 12y ago

> a lot of badly-written toy programs. That's not necessarily true. On some panel about python, one of the participants who teaches python to science students said that after their relatively short amount of training, scientists can do useful stuff with python and that resonated well within the panel.

kimdouglasmason 12y ago
This is another example of a field where coding is relevant to the job. Many current scientific methods involve heavy use of computers for things like simulation, complex calculation, or control of custom built equipment. I still maintain there are many professions where coding is almost completely irrelevant. Some scientists use general purpose programming languages as part of their work. No (for example) physical therapist does this as part of their work. Many people on this board also seem to underestimate just how difficult it can be to learn to code for many people who have skills in other areas. People who are studying science are probably the type who are good at coding. If you want to see how difficult coding is for many, just look at the drop-out rates in Computer Science 1. The general argument that I am responding to is that coding is comparable to literacy. I argue that both in need and applicability, it simply is not. If you are illiterate, the number one thing you can generally do to improve your life is learn to read. I argue that unlike literacy, there are many professions where learning how to code provides less benefit than spending that effort learning or doing something else.
- hershel 12y ago
  I agree , but those same claims are true for many subjects learned at school, for example math.
- leot 12y ago
  Much of your thesis relies on the following: > If you are illiterate, the number one thing you can generally do to improve your life is learn to read. I agree that this certainly holds true today, since our culture now uses reading through and through. But in the history of our species, literacy is the weird exception, not the norm. For your argument to hold, it needs to have been true when only, say, 3% of the population could read and write (basically, a proportion comparable to today's proportion of people who "know how to code"). This graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png) suggests that the comparable era may be sometime around the medieval period, and it's not at all clear that your thesis would obviously hold true then, when other skills (hunting, barrel making, blacksmithing, etc.) would be far more immediately remunerative. When books are scarce, and few of one's peers are literate, being literate will do far less to improve one's life.

leot 12y ago

Implicit in what you've written is the idea that humanity has reached some kind of end state in contemporary modernity. Yet given the accelerating pace of change, when the humans of 200 years from now look back on us, they'll undoubtedly see us as even more primitive and different than humans from the 1800s do to us today. Future-humans might even lament how poor and stuck we all were, perhaps in large part because so few of us could program. Illiterate societies indeed tend to not progress, and humanity at the moment has massive problems that it shows little evidence of being able to contend with. You're completely right that existing professions, as currently practiced, benefit little from adding to them an ability to program. Yet we're seeing a massive trend away from many current professions, as currently practiced. Many jobs are getting automated out of existence[1]. The chief culprit? Software. [1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594298-effect-todays-technology-tomorrows-jobs-will-be-immenseand-no-country-ready http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594298-effect-todays...

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago

Instead of looking for the negative impact on society, have you tried looking for the possible positive impact _if_ everyone knew basic CS and programming? I see that those should logically be isomorphic, but I think the way you frame the question makes a big difference as to what you will discover. I think literacy is a very good comparison. Society certainly did work without everyone being literate, with just a few specialists who knew how to read and write, and there was no obvious need for everyone to learn it, and it is a huge investment of time and effort for everyone who has to go through it, so it would seem like a natural candidate for specialization, wouldn't it? Yet, as you note, essentially universal literacy has transformed the way we live massively for the better, and few would argue that this massive investment of every single person is not worth it and we should return to specialists taking care of our reading and writing. Now, the question is: What would a society with universal knowledge of CS and programming basics look like? What would future kimdouglasmasons say when they claim that some new skill is not worth teaching to everybody because there simply is no comparison to computationality? How were pre-computational societies fundamentally held back in their progress, what kind of fundamental transformations of society would never have been possible if people had stayed uncomputational? Your example isn't particularly helpful. Anatomy is not a widely applicable set of skills. There never is any question of whether you could use the help of an anatomist to help you solve an anatomy problem with your new motor design or your new soup recipe. Automated computation, much like literacy, essentially can be applied everywhere. That's why you write "it's much more efficient for specialist developers to consult with domain experts". That sentence only makes sense for universally applicable skills - I doubt many anatomists often consult with domain experts because they need to apply their knowledge in a field they so far have no clue of. Also, the grocery lists a literate society writes also aren't of particular literary value. That does not mean that society isn't better of for people being able to write them. And to appreciate more the works of those who still are "literacy professionals", who obviously still have their place in society.

zanny 12y ago

> write that software, and sell it into the industry I hope by this you mean start a collective open standards FOSS project to fill the need, rather than write proprietary software that every single firm will redundantly reproduce because nobody wants to embrace the information age. That is the same kind of backwards redundancy that highlights why "everyone coding" is a bad idea. > I would hope they choose the later Medicine is rapidly being transformed by AI, robotics, and automation. In decades we should see the complete replacement of human labor in many surgical procedures, since a programmed machine can be much more precise and interpret the bodies signals and vitals in much greater clarity. But do you want doctors, the experts on performing these procedures, writing the code, or do you you want programmers who know to ironlad it against unexpected behavior to write the code? (trick question, we want both, but the doctors need to be computer literate and the programmers medically literate, but usually the later is more true than the former). I think there is a misnomer equating computer literacy with writing software. The latter can give the former, but it doesn't always happen - I know many SEs who can't point out a hard drive from RAM, and couldn't make heads or tails of problems out of their niche domain. That isn't really computer literacy either, even if they live in a deep crevase within it. I think computer literacy, as others in this thread have pointed out, should be its own course - just like English literature. You want to convey the macroscopic concepts and motivations and overarching conventions, rather than the minute details. The analogy would be do you care about sentence structure, word density, and subliminal messaging in Lit 101 - well, no, you care about overarching plot and meaning. Any computer literacy class should have a cirriculum teaching its students what code is, but that doesn't mean they need to know how to write it. They should just understand how the machines in their day to day lives work, and how to control them if they want to from there. Because so many people are misinformed or just ignorant about what these magical glowy screens of letters and pictures actually are to begin with. It is the difference between being able to appreciate literature and being able to write world class novels.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

>A society of part-time coders would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written toy programs. What's the point? If I may extend the previous metaphor: society already produces fanfiction.net, so I think we'll survive this too.