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Comment by gohrt | Hacker News Reader

> A society of part-time coders would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written toy programs. What's the point?

Maybe you are embarassed by the content of github, but many of us feel it is changing the word for the better.

An Excel jockey writing macros -> better spreadsheets.

A writer who can analyze and restructure their story, wihout laboriously poring and cutting and pasting -> better stories.

There was a time when 'writing' was a specialist activity best left to professionals. Imagine if that never changed?

We don't need everyone to be an anatomist, but certainly we should all know enough about our own bodies to feed and exercise them properly. I hope we never live in a world where we only eat what The Nutritionist hands to us, and we only move our bodies in the way The Physiologist instructs us.

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I didn't mention github, and don't see it as especially relevant.

If you are an 'excel jockey', then your job involves coding. Of course knowing how to code to some degree will make you better. I don't see that as a good example. You should have used one of the many professions that currently involve no coding at all as an example.

There was also a time when civil engineering was a specialist activity best left to professionals, and it still is. You seem to believe that coding is akin to literacy. I believe it is not, and have provided some reasons in my previous post.

>>You should have used one of the many professions that currently involve no coding at all as an example.

Okay, I'll bite.

My dad is an ophthalmologist in Turkey. He runs his own private practice. When he opened the clinic in the early 90s, he quickly realized that keeping track of patient records in paper format was not efficient. So he taught himself Microsoft Access (which came out in 1992!) and wrote his own patient record management software, which greatly increased his productivity and therefore income/leisure time.

Fast-forward to 2011. I was organizing an international conference and needed to send out some email blasts. The problem was, all the email addresses I needed were on a several hundred page PDF document with no clear format. So I had a choice: I could spend days manually copy-pasting and cleaning stuff up, or I could try to automate it. I ended up writing a Ruby script that grabbed the embedded text and pattern-matched email addresses and spat them out onto a text file. Still not perfect (my regex was rudimentary) but it got the job done a lot faster. Learning basic Ruby took me several hours, and I ran into some (silly) issues [1], but that's still better than the several days I would have spent doing the task manually.

You may be thinking, "well, we have specialists for that sort of thing today." Sure. But just like there are many rural areas in the US where it doesn't make economic sense for ISPs to lay out fiber, there are many personal tasks and errands where it doesn't make sense for professional developers to write software for. So there is a lot to be said for the need for individual empowerment through programming.

[1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6566884/rubys-file-open-g...

I'm still not convinced by those examples. My reasoning is opportunity cost.

If you have to learn to code to write some software, and then write it yourself, you will generally be less efficient at it than contracting someone else to do so. Furthermore, the contractor has a chance of potentially reselling the software to other clients (thus increasing efficiency even more), which you do not.

If it was cheaper for your father to write his own software in this case, then to me this indicates one of several things: 1. That he had already learned to code for some other reason (possibly a hobby). 2. That there was no opportunity cost because his business was operating way below capacity. If this is the case, his time is best spent fixing that problem first. 3. That there is an under-developed market for software services.

Your fathers' example also ignores some potential problems. A novice rolling their own DB code is likely to make novice mistakes, increasing the chance of (expensive) data loss or corruption.

I remain unconvinced that for a busy non-software specialist (such as a physical therapist, a welder, and many other professions) writing any software more complicated than a spreadsheet formula or macro is worth the opportunity cost. That doesn't mean that these people will never configure existing software, or write small scripts in DSLs, but I don't consider that 'knowing how to code' any more than I consider being able to remove one of my own teeth 'knowing how to dentist'.

Things you're not taking into account:

  1. Basic knowledge of programming gives you better odds of successfully interacting with specialists.

  2. Specialists are not always available.

  3. Specialists are not always affordable.

Just because there's somebody who's out there that can do it better doesn't mean that's the one true answer--I can damn well try to stop the bleeding before I seek a trauma doctor, to use an example.

In day-to-day life, learning just enough Ruby or Python or Perl to scratch an itch or Access to make a (terrible) DB is quite acceptable.

Well, I agree that non-professionals probably should avoid writing anything complicated, as there is a high risk that they will make bad mistakes.

However, that IMO does not mean that it's not good for essentially everyone to have at least some basic knowledge of programming and CS basics. For one, communicating your needs to a professional is also pretty costly, especially so when the task at hand also needs specialized knowledge from your own field (be it that communicating the requirements is a lot of work upfront or that the project in the first (few) round(s) doesn't end up doing what you expected it to do - not exactly unheard of in the software world), and secondly, even if the problem that you need to solve is too difficult for you to solve with your basic knowledge, that basic knowledge might still be very helpful in communicating the problem to the professional, as you might be able to see what kind of information the professional needs in order to help you. Plus, it might allow you to better select a good professional - the risk of hiring someone who isn't actually all that much of a professional is pretty real, after all, so adding to the costs of not learning and doing it yourself.

You do realize what you did in Ruby that took you a couple of hours to learn could have been done with grep in one line?

I do, yes. I was using Windows at the time, unfortunately. So I wasn't aware of a tool like Grep (or that it was available for Windows as a downloadable tool). Besides, I was looking for an excuse to learn a bit of programming, some sort of practical, small-scale project, so it worked out. ;)

I really doubt that he spent a few hours fiddling with regexps. 'Those darn @ signs! Just how do I match them?!' I suspect the few hours had to do more with the part he mentions about extracting the embedded text from a PDF. (I've seen a lot of PDFs where a standard tool like pdf2text spits out garbage.)

> There was a time when 'writing' was a specialist activity best left to professionals. Imagine if that never changed?

Writing = thoughts put on paper. When writing was a "specialist" activity it was due mostly to technical difficulties rather than people needing a whole new breed of skills. The anatomist analogy is a good one. But if we extend it to IT, it doesn't mean everybody should be able to program. Rather, everybody should know basic computer operation and how to use the most popular programs.

Programming = putting thoughts into computers in executable form.

I think all people should learn how to make computer do their bidding at a rate more than one click at a time.

Don't stop there. Architecture = putting thoughts in a "virtual building" form. Therefore everyone should learn how to design their own house. Seriously, you're making quite the jump putting writing on the same level as programming.

More importantly, writing is an important mode of communication in a way programming will never be (and programming shouldn't be expected to be that).

Penpals don't mail source code back and forth to each other.

Thinking knowing to code is as important as literacy is just another version of people thinking their specific profession is super-important because it's what they spend their time doing. I imagine some especially pompous auto mechanics think knowing the internals of a car is as important as reading and writing. (Though, I imagine there are much fewer pompous auto mechanics than pompous hackers.)

A writer who can analyze and restructure their story, wihout laboriously poring and cutting and pasting -> better stories.

How is this related to knowing how to code?

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