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Comment by JshWright | Hacker News Reader

> But coding? Unless it's part of your job, the odds are vanishingly small that it will ever be of much use to you.

It's silly to reduce this to "Programming is useless outside of STEM". I once saved an admin assistant _days_ of work because I happened to stop by her desk to chat and noticed the task she was doing (combining some spreadsheets) would be trivial to automate. She had estimated at the rate she was going, she had 17 hours of work left.

I'm not suggesting she should know how to write script to parse and combine a bunch of csv's... But a basic 'literacy' in programming would have at least let her know there was a better way...

I have plenty of similar anecdotes, and I would guess many of you do as well...

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Good point. Knowing it could be done would have been good enough for her, because then she would have known to ask someone to help her. If you have at least an idea of what's possible, you can then have a good idea when it makes sense to ask the expert to give you a little help.

She certainly would never _need_ to know how to do it herself, although there's nothing wrong with that. If she were asking the expert for something every day, then it might make sense to teach her more, but if the requests are infrequent and not time-consuming, then the productivity wins can be had without teaching someone something she doesn't need to know.

I think you are confusing things. Nobody wants the entire world to be CS experts. What most people are advocating is that an entry level CS course be given to all students. Just how we make them take Chemistry, Physics, literature.

No, I'm not confusing things, I'm trying to suggest that even just understanding what basic coding can provide would be of a lot of benefit to people. I think having everyone take a basic CS course is a fine idea.

While I think you make a good and valid point, why programming specifically?

For instance, I have been exposing myself to electronics and it suddenly became obvious how I can build certain circuits to save me time/money, where it was never obvious before. Why isn't Obama pushing for everyone to learn electronics?

Caveat: I'm not from the US. Maybe electronics is already part of the curriculum. (Basic) programming has been part of the public school curriculum here for several decades. My father even recounts using punch cards back in his day.

>>But a basic 'literacy' in programming would have at least let her know there was a better way...

That has very little to do with programming and much to do with skills like analysis, reasoning, problem identification and thinking in the direction of automation(Reduction of human effort).

Let me as you a simple question. If learning programming teaches you to naturally thing about automation. Why haven't programmers automated programming itself completely?

Programmers have been automating "programming itself" through the creation of higher level languages (ASM->OOP) and through things like libraries. Programmers are always thinking about how to automate the automating. The entire notion of abstraction could be thought of as automation.

Literacy in programming does help people recognize ways of reducing human effort. I believe it fundamentally changes the way you think especially in areas of analysis, reasoning and problem identification.

>>Literacy in programming does help people recognize ways of reducing human effort.

Literacy in any equivalent domain, which uses significant level of Math helps you recognize ways of reducing human effort.

Programming is one such domain.

>>I believe it fundamentally changes the way you think especially in areas of analysis, reasoning and problem identification.

We already have a subject to take care of that. Its called 'Math'. If you are not teaching Math properly, merely replacing with an abstract domain of Math and teaching it equally badly won't cause any reasonable impact.

What's more learning nearly anything well, encourages analytical skills, reasoning and problem identification. Law, medicine, accounting, teaching, farming, nursing, personal finance etc etc the list is endless.

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