John Pasmore's Occassional Blog

Can/should everyone code by John Pasmore

Short answer, yes. Like math or perhaps more like learning a little bit about some foreign language, everyone should have some idea how computers think. But, not everyone is built to be a programmer.

And I think we need to evolve what we generally think of as coding to better understand how varied it can be — from building a website’s front-end to writing an encryption algorithm. Math is not central to all levels of programming, but it’s central to how computers think, so I think a curriculum of early math needs to include logic in a way it hasn’t been taught before.

I’ve taken the sometimes painful choice to return to university fairly late in life (generally the oldest in class, including professor in many cases). And am very aware that my memory has not been trained for programming, which ideally requires long, quiet, sustained thinking on a series of problems. Working as an executive at even a web-driven start-up has generally required fairly short interactions with problems, with the goal if dispensing with as many problems as quickly as possible. Somewhat, but not quite, the opposite of programming.

My goal is that I want to understand how computers really think and what they’re capable of. As a ‘senior’ I think I am just getting a grip on this. That’s another post. Short answer yes — computers will be smarter and more ubiquitous. It’s going to be helpful to be as fluent as possible….

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