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I am sorry but what is with the attempt to get everyone and their petfish to learn how to code? From everywhere and nowhere initiatives and organizations pop up

I am sorry but what is with the attempt to get everyone and their petfish to learn how to code? From everywhere and nowhere initiatives and organizations pop up to teach X demography or Y culture to learn how to code. For what purpose? Just because all the big investment money and SV hype everybody wants to get some piece of the cake? Because we are facing a massive lack in programmers? Or does it actually have a purpose? I mean there are hundreds of professions and skills which are more life critical and/or meaningful than knowing how to write code and could actually improve society if the same effort and resources were put into it as that currently is being put in getting everyone to code. Don't get me wrong, computers are more important than ever but does that mean everybody should be able to program one?

falcor84 12y ago
I tend to agree with this widespread statement of "coding is the new literacy". I don't think that everybody should make programming their life's work, just like not everyone is earning their daily bread by writing. But given that quite about everything around us is programmable, someone who has no concept at all of how programming works could be left behind.
- bvanslyke 12y ago
  I don't see how they would be left behind, unless you mean being left out of the job market for software engineers. And that isn't enough reason to say everyone should code. It doesn't seem to me like it's comparable to literacy at all. While I need to be literate to use anything that was written in English, I don't need to take CS101 to use anything that was written in code. e: And while it's useful to produce written English all the time, we would have to be living in a crazy universe for it to be worth it for the average person to need to produce code.
jvagner 12y ago
I, for one, have no inclination to push my 10 year Minecraft- obsessed son to code. If he wants to, that's fine and I'll support it. But he loves skiing and backpacking and architecture just as much. I'm probably biased against coding, being an IT/software guy for the last 20 years.

falcor84 12y ago

I tend to agree with this widespread statement of "coding is the new literacy". I don't think that everybody should make programming their life's work, just like not everyone is earning their daily bread by writing. But given that quite about everything around us is programmable, someone who has no concept at all of how programming works could be left behind.

bvanslyke 12y ago
I don't see how they would be left behind, unless you mean being left out of the job market for software engineers. And that isn't enough reason to say everyone should code. It doesn't seem to me like it's comparable to literacy at all. While I need to be literate to use anything that was written in English, I don't need to take CS101 to use anything that was written in code. e: And while it's useful to produce written English all the time, we would have to be living in a crazy universe for it to be worth it for the average person to need to produce code.

jvagner 12y ago

I, for one, have no inclination to push my 10 year Minecraft- obsessed son to code. If he wants to, that's fine and I'll support it. But he loves skiing and backpacking and architecture just as much. I'm probably biased against coding, being an IT/software guy for the last 20 years.