I really, really disagree with Jeff Atwood here. Jeff has interpreted "learn to code" with "become a programmer". They're not the same thing. I don't think that is what this meme is about at all.

Programming is logical thinking in practise. Programming is breaking a problem set down, thinking step by step through it, thinking of edge cases, and making it work. There is nothing wrong with Jeff's BASIC example, if that is where the mayor of NYC ends up.

There was once a time when books were only read and written by an elite group. Now everyone can read - and everyone can write. There are still the elite authors that write better than the rest of us. Just because everyone can write, doesn't mean everyone is trying to be a professional author.

Computers are a part of society. To function well in society, it's beneficial to understand a little about how they work, and how to make them do things. The essence of programming is making a computer do something more efficiently than you can.

Programming isn't just the advanced stuff - recursion, pointers, functional programming, or whatever. Maybe Jeff is too far down the rabbit hole to realise this, but most people don't know what programming even looks like. They don't know how we tell computers to do the things they do. Recently I was with a customer, making notes about changes I needed to make to their application. They asked me "Is that how you make it do that?". No - that was my TODO file. And these are people that work on computers all day, every day.

It's beneficial if marketing folk understand the basics of programming when they're doing web ads. It's useful that CAD engineers know the basics so they can automate AutoCAD. Its useful that financial accountants know basic programming so they can become more efficient with analysing data.

If the mayor of NYC wants to learn to program in his spare time, why the hell not? I bet there wouldn't be the same complaints if he wanted to learn how to surf.

edit: grammar

With a couple of months of programming knowledge, I wrote a program that saved my company $2MM/year. The key was combining knowledge of the business processes with some knowledge of programming. There were people with knowledge of one or the other, but not both.

I still can't write a basic app, but that doesn't matter. I can do things that provide massive value, and I wouldn't be able to do them without programming knowledge.

I think Jeff is underestimating how much time the average office worker would save simply by learning Excel Macros or some basic scripting. Learning to program is really damn valuable, especially in fields where most people don't know any programming.