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Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

"Zuck, Gates, Dorsey, Houston, etc. are all encouraging people to learn to code for this reason"

Certainly the self serving reason for the push can't be overlooked. The more people that are pushed into coding the more of a chance that Zuck/Dorsey/Houston can find a superstar to hire.

I'm sure in any industry (medical research as only one example) the people in that industry would love if more young people took a shining to what they do. Then they would have more to pick from. Sports works the same way. If you get a bunch of people interested in football out of the funnel comes some superstars and you have an entire industry.

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I'm not so sure if I agree with the self serving push. I mean sure, these guys want great engineers--in fact, Zuckerberg explicitly states that.

But also remember that Zuckerberg is now investing in young medical research and Gates has been a philanthropic investor for a long time--these guys are looking beyond their companies and show that they truly care about the world and solving the BIG problems that exist. They are literally world-serving through these investments.

If there's no self interest involved at all how come Objective-C is not on the list of languages that they're pushing?

Because it isnt that great of a language and only a handful of people can actually make money with it?

291K "app economy" jobs is nothing to sneer at: http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/. One of 'em is mine. I support a family of five with it. Why isn't that on the list of things we'd want to teach kids to be able to do?

The code.org video opens with a Steve Jobs quote, and the language that powers much of his legacy isn't good enough to teach? Really?

Did you care to calculate out how much $8B is when it is spread out over 270,000 people and 5 years? Apple is a big company, no doubt, but it is not an economy...no matter how hard their PR department tries to spin their "study"

let me know if im missing something, but where do they mention specific programming languages? I don't seem to see any reference to it. Furthermore, Objective C is taught like the others--for example, CodeSchool has an entire section on iOS app development and an Objective C tutorial to go along with it...

When you volunteer to teach (http://www.code.org/help), they list languages that you can teach, and the list they push does not include Objective-C. Nor is there an "other" option.

EDIT: They added an "other" option to that list since yesterday when I first tried to sign up. That's a good start.

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