Screwtape at
Somebody on lobste.rs rhetorically asked why anyone should care if the general public finds it difficult to learn to program. After all, we nerds learned well enough without help, and the average Joe doesn't really need an algorithm to pay his rent or buy his groceries.
My reply:
People need to know programming for the same reason people need to know arithmetic or how laws get made: because other people already know those things, and many of those other people are quite happy to use that information to exploit people who don’t know those things. Consider how much of an advantage payday loan sharks have over people who haven’t internalised the mechanics of compound interest, or how much of an advantage organisations with professional lobbyists have over other organisations, and compare that to how much of an advantage Google and Facebook have over people who don’t understand data-mining and automated data processing in general.People really need to know programming, but it’s the kind of need that’s most obvious in retrospect, when it’s too late to do anything about.
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