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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

Of course programming is not "for everyone", if nothing else simply because the economy wouldn't work properly if everyone was a programmer.

I do think that everyone with a reasonable intellect can learn some amount of programming literacy though. The point of having universal programming education is not so that everyone can become a software engineer, it's so that you can have a society where >50% of people in the workforce understand the difference between an if and a for loop and have some notion that you can nest computer programs inside each other using functions etc.

When I was at school we all had to play football (soccer), the notion that I would ever become a professional football player is laughable but I assume that I learnt something about fitness, strategy and teamwork from the exercise.

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On the economic note, I'm actually quite surprised at the level of altruism present in the industry. Although most won't become professionals, the rate of matriculation into the workforce will still be greater than that of football players, and will still have adverse effects. Proliferation of programming can only lead to a more saturated labor force and lower wages. Yet, people still enthusiastically champion programming education...

It just seems odd to me. Very few other professions are keen on diminishing their employment prospects in the name of education.

I think most professions are reasonably happy to educate people when given the opportunity.

Sure, more programmers might lead to labour saturation but the bigger risk is that an emerging market country sees the opportunity and captures the demand first which will cause first world programmers to have to compete with hordes of lower priced competitors rather than a smaller number of domestic ones.

That's not really the point. Or, rather, that really shouldn't be the point. There will always be the silly realities and quirks of computer systems that will take some intense local domain knowledge to work around, and for that we will always need a class of programming professionals. But programming entails a hell of a lot more than the world of computers.

The words program and procedure existed before computers did; computers merely forced us to acknowledge the need for and develop a formal means of describing and discussing procedure. That kind of knowledge isn't bound by any particular class of machine, nor by any language. It applies to almost every aspect of complex endeavour. It allows people to think about how they are doing things. Just as a Karnaugh map can help a circuit designer see redundancies in logical inputs, a codified description of a process—any process—can help people see ineficiencies and redundancies in what they are doing (or what they are having other people do). Perhaps we don't really want to Taylorize the world, but if people can find ways to eliminate wasted effort, then they benefit whether they ever program a computer or not.

The demand still dramatically outstrips the supply for the time being and programming has a social network effect. Every device/store/application provides a wealth of data and interaction that other programmers can improve, work on or analyze. 3000 stores ordering by paper catalogues isn't nearly as useful or programmable as those same stores with computerized systems.

FitBit's value increases with each app that uses it's interface to do something new. Each of those apps has it's value increased by something like FitBit coming out. Some areas of programming are competitive but most are collaborative.

Also I think most programmers see programming as a force of good in the world. Technology can protect us, help us find what we want, and even get rid of boring jobs for us, most people who write code that does something like this want others to be able to do the same. Of course this is the altruism you are talking about I suppose.

Eventually, though, everyone who has a job will be a programmer, because every other type of job will be done by robots. Everyone else will be leisurely unemployed. Or starving, whichever...

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