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Comment by devoutsalsa | Hacker News Reader

I don't like to say that not everyone can code. I like to say that not everyone will enjoy coding. Personally, I find it more liberating to confront my personal challenges in learning something in terms of how much fun I'm having and/or how much work it'll take to get good at it.

For many years I told tried coding and told myself that I couldn't do it when it got to hard. But the honest answer is that I simply didn't want to put in the work.

Later in life that changed, and I started seriously working at learning to code around age 35 because I was having fun. I decided to go for it professionally at age 38, and got my first coding gig at age 40.

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I don't know why we have to sugarcoat it. Not only can anyone not be able to code, I'd go as far as saying that MOST people will never be able to code a production application no matter how much teaching/resources you throw their way.

My mother, at her peak, would have never learned how to code even if you held a gun to her head.

Would have is different than could have.

There’s lots of things in life I don’t care to learn, but it doesn’t mean I couldn’t. To be perfectly frank, programming is one of the easier things in life I’ve learned, and it’s usually only difficult for the wrong reasons like poor documentation, bugs in other people’s code, people, etc.

This. First of all, I don’t think there is a “critical” period for learning programming like there is for languages, or motor skills (try learning to skateboard as an adult). My school curriculum, a foreign language and, yes, skateboarding have all been a lot more challenging than programming. I’d say that learning network administration is probably a lot harder too b/c stuff like that isn’t as logical as a programming language.

I actually meant could have.

If your mother ever told you how to do something which required you to make decisions along the way, she’s a coder.

According to that reasoning, babies are coders too.

Babies' demands certainly do compel parents to figure out what to do so they can get enough peace to grab time back for themselves.

What changes once babies grow into toddlers is that they develop the capacity to learn new behaviours, not just through the trial and error of stimulus/response, but through instructions given by language. That's where mothers and fathers excel. The quality of their instructions can be measured by the agility and resilience of the behaviour these instructions impart.

Done well, parenting is not just coding - it's software engineering.

Then we are all coders. Even dogs are coders.

Guess they were wrong when they said people from dying industries should learn some programming: we were coders all along!

> ...never be able to code a production application...

It's true, the vast majority of people will never code a "production application".

BUT, many folks code everyday in the form of excel macros, R, Mathematica, Matlab or Julia notebooks. Many people create programs and scripts in all kinds of tools to get stuff done. IT'S ALL STILL PROGRAMMING, it's just not what folks here would consider a traditional "production application". The people who do this are domain practitioners who use computing to do things, but don't have a need to spend a million dollars to hire a team of "real programmers" and their entourage of PMP's, sales, support, and customer success agents to do it for them.

As far as folks "not being able to code" that's all a matter of inclination and background. There's nothing special about software development. Lot's of people can do successfully at various levels. Some are more DIY than others, but I think you would be surprised at what some people's grandma's can do with the right motivation and background.

> There's nothing special about software development.

There's also "nothing special" about writing. Somehow, though, we don't see millions of Hemingways pop up each year.

Writing code is a form of art. There is a science behind it, but the same is true for many other art forms. It's true that everybody can be an artist. Not everybody can be a good artist, though. It's equally true for writers, painters, and coders.

And "writing" is still a good skill to have, even if you are not a professional essayist or author.

Yes. But writing a letter to friend (or automating your accounting in Excel) differs from writing "War and Peace" (or writing an OS kernel). I think everybody is capable of learning to do the former, but have a really hard time beliving the same for the latter.

We don't need "millions of Hemingway's".

The parent comment was suggesting that very few people can code-- and by "code" they meant "production applications".

I am trying to say that lot's of people can code, well enough to solve their domain problems, well enough to put food on their tables, well enough to not need "real programmers" in increasing numbers of scenarios. Just because they're not doing internet scale application development or cutting edge mission critical projects doesn't mean they "can't code".

There's a long and continuous spectrum between Hemingway-like programmers to bored-out-of-their-skulls enterprise developers to lunch-time dilettantes who are running a far more of their business than they should on brittle excel pivot tables and VBA macros.

Learning to code != learning to run a prod app with real clients.

I can learn to surf without being a professional surfer. So why can't I learn to code without wanting to make a career out of it?

PS I am the original blog author

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