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Comment by prichino | Hacker News Reader

At least he has opinions. The "everyoness must code" folk sometimes do sound like markov-generated text. Funny that you hold his coding opinions in less respect for what is most decidedly a not coding-related opinion. Substitute coding for "advanced mathematics", "investment banking", "nursing".

Would you lose respect for a professional nurse's nursing opinions if he said learning to nurse is a really dumb thing to do unless you intend to make a career out of it?

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An alternative analogy would be "learning first-aid is a dumb thing to do unless you become a medical professional."

I wouldn't lose respect, but it is a narrow view, and one worthy of debate.

"Programming" is such a powerful tool for everyone to interact with technology and we could do a better job exposing programatic abstractions. Think of how many people use spreadsheets with complex expressions. Is that that not also programming?

The problem is that basically every profession contains some parts that basically everyone could benefit in their daily lives from knowing. Chemistry, mechanical engineering, finance, accounting, law, sales... programming is just one item on a list of thousands of things that would be nice to know. It's not reasonable to hold it up above the rest when all of the other ones also deal with things modern life runs on. If there's a message I can get behind, it's "learn more than school taught you, and keep learning after graduation," but holding up one subject above the rest on the grounds of its importance seems a little flimsy when they're all that important. So, all of the things you could be learning on your down time are about equal. If programming has a high place, it's a high place shared among all the rest. Knowledge does have a high place, after all.

Basic mathematics, personal finance and first-aid are things everyone should learn.

Same thing for coding. It is unreasonable to ask everyone to write a compiler or anything on that scale, but I don't think that fizzbuzz is too much to ask. Computers are part of our everyday life now, and teaching the basics of coding early-on can help demystify them. I also think that like maths, it promotes a rigorous and logical way of thinking that can be useful in other fields.

Not the parent commenter, but kinda, yeah. Saying that it's stupid to learn x if you aren't going to monetize comes off poorly to me. So does saying that everyone should learn x. I don't understand either view.

Is it weird to have an interest in nursing and learn about it but not be interested in monetizing it? Sure, it could be. Is it dumb? No.

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