Do you think coding is a “basic skill”
I think everyone should be able to code in the way that everyone is able to read and write. This is more from a public policy perspective than anything else. A society where the vast majority of the public was illiterate, but the highest leverage information was stored and transmitted in books could only be an unfair society. There&#x27;s no need for everyone to be able to write books, but to know they&#x27;re there and be able to access the information stored in them should the need arise is critical if you want people to have equal opportunities (at least in an asymptotic, order of magnitude sense). In that sense yes it is a basic skill that everyone should know how to do.<p>Yeah, tech companies would love it if there were greater supply in the developer labor market. That&#x27;s not sufficient reason to necessarily be against things that expand supply, like everyone learning coding basics. Know what would make all of our salaries even higher? If we made sure the proles can&#x27;t even read! You won&#x27;t seriously say &quot;Literacy is just an attempt by companies to increase the supply of high skilled office workers and reduce our salary.&quot; Also, what usually happens when a large portion of a country&#x27;s able-bodied men are unable to work and society continues to punish them for being economically unproductive? I&#x27;d rather deal with a crowded job market than an American redux of the French or Bolshevik revolutions (it doesn&#x27;t matter if the lack of opportunity is intentionally or situationally inflicted, starving angry hopeless people are actually one of the few predictable kinds of people).<p>If you believe that the point of education is to provide a reasonably skilled workforce to the economy then teaching basic coding to everyone makes sense (scripting will only become more powerful. User defined formulae and their ilk will exist outside of spreadsheets). If you believe that the point of education is to provide each member of society a reasonable set of opportunities to succeed in the economy they will need to compete in, then teaching basic coding to everyone makes sense. If, god forbid, you think the point is to provide a menu of all the interesting things that you can learn about and the minimum requisite skills for those pursuits, then it makes sense.<p>Some arguments against teaching Coding&#x2F;CS and rebuttals.<p>The teachers won&#x27;t all be Donald Knuth, that&#x27;s fine. We make due with English teachers whose greatest literary contributions were terrible college lit mag poems, let&#x27;s not hold coding&#x2F;CS classes to higher standards.<p>Not everyone has the aptitude, sure, but plenty of us went through 12 years of Spanish class and would still be skin-crawlingly awkward to watch try to order a Taco in Spanish. If we didn&#x27;t try to teach everyone things for which not everyone had the aptitude, then how would you discover that you did indeed have the aptitude?<p>It&#x27;s a professional skill and lay people don&#x27;t need to worry they&#x27;re silly little heads about it? Then you never get to complain when no one around you seems to have an issue with voting for politicians who want to make encryption that &quot;only the good guys&quot; can unlock. How the hell is the average person supposed to understand why the wizards can do magic and put porn on their iPhones but they can&#x27;t preferentially unlock said iPhones for the feds <i>and</i> protect them from hackers? Ever had someone who wants you to something stupid like &quot;I need to make sure this file is totally and permanently securely deleted. But I need to be able to retrieve it later&quot; or some other equally stupid request? It&#x27;s because the person asking doesn&#x27;t remotely understand how computers work. That guy isn&#x27;t going to come steal your programming job if he has to take a year of CS in high school, but he might be easier in stakeholder meetings.<p>Look at Facebook or YouTube. Most people seem to be literate(ish). You wouldn&#x27;t want to even interview them for a role that required writing at a professional level, but you understood what they wrote. If we could achieve the code equivalent of literate(ish), imagine the kinds of programs that you could produce. You <i>can</i> make apps that work with illiterate people, but your design choices are severely restricted. If you had a society of code-literate(ish) people then you could create a whole new order of user created content on a massive scale. Yeah, like youtube comments most of that content will be a terrible waste of storage and computation, but look at minecraft and the open source world to see what good might arise out of it.<p>Generously, I see arguments against at least teaching everyone extremely basic coding (like 1 class for 1 year in school) as shortsighted or technocratically patronizing. Cynically I see it as either a &quot;fuck you I got mine&quot; moment, or a thoroughly misguided effort at guild-like protectionism.