It's not relevant in day-to-day living, but neither is reading for the most part. You can just watch TV and still keep up with the culture. However, if you are

It's not relevant in day-to-day living, but neither is reading for the most part. You can just watch TV and still keep up with the culture. However, if you are trying to be productive, you need to read. And knowing how to program is an advantage, too. In my personal experience, programming makes it far easier to model problems in other areas. Also: having an understanding of Topology, Linguistics, and Physics make it far easier to reason about computers. I find mathematicians who can't program to be generally slow and uselessly strict and programmers who can't think in mathematical abstractions to be terrible. (They tend to see their problems narrowly, unaware that the problem may be already solved in a more general form -- but they can't read the literature, and the culture says "writing code is more important than reading theory." No wonder they keep reimplementing the same ideas over and over again...) > Can you come up a situation that programming could accomplish in a way that a well-designed GUI couldn't? There's a problem here: by saying "well designed", you protect yourself from being wrong just by moving the goal posts. A command line is a 'well designed GUI', except nobody thinks of it that way, because it would make GUI a meaningless term. What do you mean by 'well designed' if not 'fit for its purpose?'