>Jeff's article then proceeds to present a very reasonable argument to consider for why you might not want to code, specifically, there are many useful skills in the world and maybe there's one that would serve you better than coding.
Programming is a super-power, even if you only know a little bit. Knowing how to program gives you abilities to create unequaled in the history of the world. I think that the more people who know how to program, the better, even if they "suck" by comparison to a rock star programmer (or alternately a fat guy who knows C++ [1]).
Maybe 95% of people will never be lead programmer on a commercial product, but almost everyone ends up, e.g., searching Google -- and not being afraid of complex search results can mean the difference between digging through six pages of garbage and getting relevant results right away because you weren't afraid to use the minus operator or other more "advanced" search features.
And probably most people in the workplace have to deal with an Excel spreadsheet from time to time -- being willing to dig into creating more complex formulas because they aren't afraid of lists of functions with parameters would be an obvious side effect of knowing a bit of code.
Regardless, Zed is saying that no one should be telling you that you SHOULDN'T learn to program, period. And I agree.
Programming is a super-power, even if you only know a little bit. Knowing how to program gives you abilities to create unequaled in the history of the world. I think that the more people who know how to program, the better, even if they "suck" by comparison to a rock star programmer (or alternately a fat guy who knows C++ [1]).
Maybe 95% of people will never be lead programmer on a commercial product, but almost everyone ends up, e.g., searching Google -- and not being afraid of complex search results can mean the difference between digging through six pages of garbage and getting relevant results right away because you weren't afraid to use the minus operator or other more "advanced" search features.
And probably most people in the workplace have to deal with an Excel spreadsheet from time to time -- being willing to dig into creating more complex formulas because they aren't afraid of lists of functions with parameters would be an obvious side effect of knowing a bit of code.
Regardless, Zed is saying that no one should be telling you that you SHOULDN'T learn to program, period. And I agree.
[1] http://betabeat.com/2012/05/04/pro-tip-from-silicon-valley-s...