Everyone Should Learn Programming

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 04 Mar 2013

Over the years a lot of highly influential people have dropped the phrase "Everyone Should Learn Programming" and recently some very successful people in software companies made a video called "What most schools don't teach". While this video is spot on there seem to be a lot of confusion between learning programming and pursuing programming as a profession.

Almost everything today is built on micro-processors and use electricity and basic knowledge about programming will give you an idea of how complex some systems are. Everyone that works professionally with programming knows that the customer never really knows what it is they want and think they can just change their minds in the middle of the project. How many of you have heard the phrase "Can't you just move X? That shouldn't be too hard."? This is born from a lack of understanding of how systems are built. With basic programming knowledge it might be a lot easier to explain complexity in a lot of the custom built solutions that we tackle every day.

Some say math is the foundation of understanding programming but personally without programming I wouldn't have understood some math that I've experienced. With the help of a very basic program I could make the learning of some math fun and exciting, even if it was just a boring console application. From this point of view programming can make learning difficult topics easier.

Everyone Should Learn Programming because they'll get a much better understanding of the digital world that we live in.

Pursuing programming as a profession is a completely different subject.

Every programming job that I've had have been different, some jobs required me to work more than 40 hours per week and some jobs somewhat had a clock that we clocked-in with and only worked 8 hours per day on weekdays. However a lot of programmers don't leave their work at work and frankly their personalities aren't programmed that way. I for one love exploring new things, I love writing about technology and doing as much programming as my personal life lets me. Everyone is different though. I know a lot of programmers that don't want to live like that, they want 40 hour weeks and that is fine; it works very well for them.

In the video "What most schools don't teach" everyone started programming before they hit 10 years old, which isn't at all required for you to work professionally with programming. I know talented programmers that started working with programming in their late 20s and when I worked as a teacher for a programming education we had students that were close to 45. It's never too late. I even read an article a while back about a man around 85 years old that recently learned JavaScript and he loved it!

Everyone Should Not Work With Programming. But that doesn't mean everyone shouldn't Learn Programming.

I program because I love it and when I started working with programming the money was crap but I still did it because I loved it.