Comment by mitsche | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitsche | Hacker News Reader

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You seem to be a bit disconnected from reality. If I told any one of my friends who are not programmers by trade to look for code samples, they would either not understand what I'm talking about, or simply not know where to look.

Most people don't even have the slightest idea what kind of problems software can solve. Jeff Atwood seems to interpret "learn to code" as "learn to set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH variable". Others—myself included—think that having at least a bit of exposure to programming provides you with a better overall understanding of how computers operate.

I don't think it's necessary to have that understanding. But neither is speaking a second natural language. Apart from acquiring the skills themselves, learning any of those will teach you meaningful things about yourself and your environment, which seems to be worthwhile.

Most people don't even have the slightest idea what kind of problems software can solve.

I was once told by a good friend of mine in industry X[1] that people in that industry have money but they don't know whats possible - they don't know what could be automated or calculated with computers and so they don't do it, even though it would provide a lot of value to them.

[1] In general, I think the industry is irrelevant and this applies to most industries that don't already directly employ programmers. There are often already some high tech firms that do and they have a huge advantage over the masses that don't. In this particular case, the industry was the betting (horses) industry and there are actually plenty of firms that are high tech and hire programmers and mathematicians and such to create complex software, but I think his point is that there are still a lot of smaller firms and people who spend a lot of money that still don't know what is actually possible. He since moved to a much more high tech company, but he still does most (if not all) of his complex risk assessment modeling in excel.

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