Please learn to code
This stupid, snobby, pointless (unless you consider desperate trolling for visits a point) article from a couple days ago has really been sticking in my craw. “Please don’t learn to code” could be alternately titled “why people hate developers”. The insecurity and elitism oozes out of every word here. “My craft is far too complex and precious for someone as stupid as you to learn it,” it says.
Let’s just be clear that there’s a HUGE difference between saying that everyone should be a developer and everyone should learn to code. The former is a dumb statement and no one would ever say it. The latter is simply that the concept of coding has become an extremely important knowledge to understanding the world around us.
I’ve spent years of working around people who work on the web for a living who still think that writing programs and web code is like writing an email in another language: that you just kind of move things around on a page. It’s not until you see how it functions—even basically—and have gone through troubleshooting even something as simple as an HTML table that you start to get how different writing code is from writing words, and start to appreciate the knowledge that goes into it.
Just as a tiny percentage of people who learn math go on to be mathematicians or engineers, teaching people basic code doesn’t mean they’ll all go off to be developers, and we don’t need them to. But we do need more people to stop segregating coding as something that only “techie” people do and they can remain willfully ignorant of.
