You confuse self-interest with hypocrisy. I am definitely self-interested and openly admit it, but I try not to be a hypocrite.
For example, I think people should spend their lives learning new things. After I write a few more comments on HN, I'm going to grab my guitar and go learn a new scale. :-)
So, your motive for attack on Jeff is self-interest?
edit: an elaboration
I'm trying to figure out what exactly Jeff wrote that you hate so much. You don't even consider his arguments, you just have "a guess about Jeff, and a general message about other people who feel the same way."
Jeff wouldn't write something like this:
"Don't listen to the hipsters who claim that coding is as vital as reading, and who claim that for the first time in the history you can learn to code, because now we have an online JavaScript course that we call "Code Year" or something like that.
But that is what I've got from his post. He's not against people learning to code, he's against making it into something that it simply isn't - a vital life skill.
I believe it is a vital skill, but that it's not being taught well enough so that's why people don't think it is. The same could be said about nearly everything we teach in K-12 at some point in the subject's history.
Also, it's not an attack, it's a counter-attack. People really need to get their order of events in the right order of events.
"The same could be said about nearly everything we teach in K-12 at some point in the subject's history"
I've been teaching for 25 years in post 18 colleges in the UK, and I have the granddaughter of one of my first students in my class now (god I feel old, my consolation is that granny was a mature student in her late 20s/early 30s when she did maths with me).
Many of my students are earning money from jobs that did not exist when I was teaching them.
Stuff changes, but learning how to think does not. There is a tension between the synthetic and the analytic, and we need both. Teenagers need to learn attention to detail, and the big picture, and time planning, and the focusing of attention. The school syllabus in every country is a political compromise that shifts over time.
I think a little space for end user style programming might help with the analytic and synthetic modes a little.
Challenge: Learn Puredata the hard way, let's do the attention to detail thing your books do to music by constructing sound?
Although, I'm still with Jeff regarding the importance of coding, I want to thank you for clarifying your position and the order of events. Happy hacking.
He also provides all of his books, in their entirety, for free on his website. He even lets you see his "beta" books, Learn C the Hardway, Learn SQL The Hardway, etc.
