Why not learn to program

Today there are many opportunities to learn how to program. But does everyone need to be able to program? In this article we tried to summarize the main provisions of the opponents of this approach.

Books, online courses, offline intensives. Scratch and Hello Ruby for children, Moscow Coding School and Code Babes for adults, Hour of Code, Year of Code, state educational programs in the USA and the UK - everything is designed so that everyone can try their hand at coding. But does everyone need to be able to program? In this article we tried to summarize the main provisions of the opponents of this approach.

Programming is a complicated process.

One of the most popular slogans is: Programming is easy. But quite the opposite: there is no universal base, a stack of technologies that could be applied in various projects; you will have to constantly study, read hundreds of pages of documentation and solve uninteresting problems that your colleagues threw at you (or you yourself a year ago). Knowledge of the programming language does not make a human developer, you need at least a basic understanding of algorithms, mathematics and related technologies. It turns out that programming is an ordinary job that requires constant self-improvement as a specialist in order to remain in demand on the labor market. It's just that modern culture has given this kind of activity a touch of freebies when, after a few hours of clicking the keys in a chic office, you go to play table tennis with your colleagues, and then you sit in Tesla and leave home.

Everyone may like programming, but not everyone will love it.

There are many wonderful things in programming that are accessible to everyone: the excitement of creating a new project; a sense of power over the machine when it executes commands exactly; the joy of victory after a long search of many solutions, reading a few topics on stackoverflow and anger at everything. But not everyone will experience this fascination with programming, will not give up this lesson, after the example, literally rewritten from the book, does not work. Programming should be such an activity that you think about in your soul (Paul Graham's wording). If you are a professional designer, artist, photographer, are looking for a developer to realize the idea of ​​your own application / service, you will repeatedly hear something like this: "Yes, learn to program yourself, now there is so much, and you are all lazy." But every hour spent on training and coding directly is an hour not spent doing what I love, not a photo taken, not a painted work. We praise programming not because of the writing of the code, but because of what we can achieve with it.

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Programming is certainly an important and useful skill, but not necessary.

To understand the technology there is no need to learn to program, as well as no need to know how the power plant works to turn on the desk lamp. Of course, if the entrepreneur does not understand programming, then the developers can deceive him, but with the same success building contractors, auditors, and advertisers can deceive him. Returning to designers working side by side with developers every day, most of them are able to carry on with in-depth conversations with programmers about the technologies used, being unable to write even lines of code. Just because they understand the basics of the process.

Discrediting educational programs.

If you start to be interested in various programs that teach programming, you can discover a lot of interesting things. So, the old program of the school course in programming in the UK provided for the creation of the site. In PowerPoint. Or Lottie Dexter, director of the program Year of Code, admitted in an interview that despite the fact that learning to program is easy and simple, you can create a website in an hour, and learn the basics of programming in a day, she never started learning to program independently. Moreover, only three people from the Board of Year of Code were programmers with a technical background and all three worked in the same company. The problem with such programs is that they do not have time to change at the same speed as technology develops.



Despite the title of the article, we support the desire of everyone who wants to learn how to program. And our task is to provide access and tools to everyone. It is important that they understand what a thorny path they are taking, and a lot has already been written about the prospects for developers.