This is a strawman. Coding has never been a prerequisite to creation. People were creative forever, and then computers came along and created new avenues for creativity. The vast majority of which is done with applications, and applications have improved by leaps and bounds every decade.
Only a very tiny portion of creative work requires actual programming, like demo scene programmers. Even video games and Pixar movies have far more artists then programmers. It's true that more and more programmers are required to extend and maintain the software, but the growth of the end-user base has far outpaced the programmers. The majority of programmers are implementing business logic of which they have minimal high-level creative input.
The things we can do with computers without code has only increased. Pontificating on how it would be better if we didn't have to write code is like someone who once used a circular saw pondering why can't artisanal wood carving also be done with simple straight-forward, easy-to-use tools instead of difficult-to-use hand tools. I mean its crazy how often we hear this refrain about coding as opposed to other professions. No one asks why can't we have a gadget to perform an appendectomy at home instead of paying a surgeon thousands of dollars, but for some reason people think that coding is somehow unnecessary magic which could be done away with by a bit of clever rethinking. But code is not some rube goldberg device designed to obfuscate and impress; code is a medium, like a blank canvas, or a sheet of typing paper, the only difference is it can control physical things. It is not one concrete thing with a specific purpose which can be optimized like a word processor, or a stove, or a faucet or a car. Less code doesn't mean a simpler world, it just means less of what code can do.
Continuing to write code, allows the profession itself to continue to be looked at as a commodity. It keeps people in jobs, and unfortunately keeps many creative thinkers out of the loop. As it is, only programmers can write code effectively enought to produce innovative web sites and therefore, web companies that reinvent the web as we know it, and produce masses of wealth. If we did not use code, not only could we be more efficient with producing these websites, becasue we would not be also producing even greater code errors, and via numerous different types of code that are all used for different things and are not designed to work well together, becasue the programmer wants to keep a monopoly on it, but all creative thinkers that have brilliant ideas on how to utilize software and the web to better the world, and the worlds of business and technology, will be also to contribute their ideas. The bottom line is that tyically, the most creative people are those whom are natural artists. But these artists arenot techies, and therefore cannot translate their creative ideas to the web or software without including the mind of a programmer. This goes for anyone with a great idea. If you have a great idea for software or the web, but then partner with a programmer to carryout your ideas. Make sure you stay on top of your game. Because just like when a story gets passed along through many people, when your idea gets translated into code from someone else, there is a lot of room for error and distortion. Just as it is when a programmer is forced to deal with numerous different programming languages just to express what they want to create. Errors occur. As youtube and digg have both cut out the middleman in video media and news, and allow the consumer to make the choice as to what they like, why not cut out the middle man(main stream media, or programming), and allow all creative people to build and create without code, but via a universal point and click type program? Let the creation come directly from the source. Until we the consumers, and the creative thinkers demand this, we will never stop writing code.
This topic recycles on HN pretty frequently. I don't believe it. I have many friends that aren't coders and it helps me remember how big the skill gap is.
Unless you've done substantial training, code seems just as opaque as medicine, or law, or most fields of engineering. Any job that requires substantial training and trust not to royally screw everything up pays well.
Perhaps 30% of the population has the creativity and analytical skills to make a decent programmer. And maybe 10% of those find a job largely comparable to doing math homework enjoyable.
Programming isn't as old as most fields of engineering, but it's older than a generation of workers. If coding was going to be commoditised it would have happened decades ago
I hate this whole idea that coding is a creative (in the artistic sense) activity.
There's a limited number of solutions to a programming task, it's about finding the one that meets most constraints, it's about cost, effort, trade offs analysis and finally implementation.
You are missing the point of his post which I believe is valid- that programming in and of itself is nothing but a skill to carry out a task. He isn't dissuading beginners from learning to code or suggesting that people shouldn't. Just that you shouldn't learn to code just for the sake of knowing how to code.
I get it. There are worse hobbies you can have and it can solve problems and spread information, etc., etc. The point is that programming should be viewed as a means to an end. Too much focus is put on coding as an end goal and writers on TechCrunch whom I suspect have never coded anything in their lives talk about how learning to code is the hot new thing and everybody should be doing it. I think it is far more useful to learn a variety of subjects, figure out what it is you want to do, and if building software is the way to achieve it, then go learn to code. But learning to code well is an enormous investment of time, so to learn to code you are choosing not to do other things that could be far more valuable to you.
A lot of people start with learning to code and then look everywhere for a problem to solve with their new skill set. That is the reverse of how problems should be solved. The technology is irrelevant. The skills are irrelevant. The problem is what should dictate the work.
- Neither is externalizing mental models or whatever.
It's not the human obligation to become more and more creative and resourceful, when less creative activities become less and less valuable, and fail to help earn a living.
The author of this article claims that people are missing the point. He's right. But he's missing the point as well, or at least arriving at a very wrong conclusion.
We're at a cusp of a very very strange era. This is the era where humans, and the capacity of human intellect, is approaching obsolescence. And the solution is not to train everyone to become like Einstein or, in this case, Knuth, or Steele, or Torvalds, or whatever.
"There can only be so many people in the entertainment industry" as Aubrey de Grey puts it.
Similarly, there can only be so many people in the "coding industry".
These people are missing a key property of coding: Coding eats itself! Or as Andreessen puts it "Software is eating the world". Meaning, coding by virtue of it happening, ends up automating aspects of itself, to the point where, a small kernel of information processing is able to carry out vast amounts of informational activity, as opposed to requiring a vast number of coders as those not familiar with coding tend to believe.
And this trend of automation will keep on increasing, giving rise to more and more serious technological unemployment, all the way to the logical conclusion of technological singularity. The sooner the "people in charge" realize this bitter truth, the better it would be for everyone.
I'm reminded of a TED talk I went to that proclaimed all code is art and everyone should code. I'm just not convinced. When you are coding I get it, coding is awesome and it can be an art, but I don't always see coding to be an integral part of every day life for most people in the same way that reading and writing is.
Most people do use a computer every day however, so there is an argument to be made that people should learn it at some point to unlock the potential of their machines. But the problem you run into here is that coding is not the same today as it was 10 years ago, and much different than it was 20 years ago. I'm still reading and writing and typing pretty much the same way that I was after learning it for the first time (with minor improvements in speed and legibility). In 10 years though, I'm pretty sure I'll be coding in something else entirely different and in a totally different style. And I also have many devices that I don't bother to code on or interact with in an advanced way, such as my smartphone.
We should teach kids code at an early age, agreed, but we also shouldn't expect them to stick with it for the rest of their lives like they would reading and writing.
Let's replace "code" with "write." Please don't learn how to write. Only writers do this, and we really don't need more of them anyway. There was a time when this wouldn't have sounded crazy.
Learning to code teaches problem solving, new ways of breaking down complex scenarios, and a means to actually build something. It's true that not everyone needs to be a software engineer, but not everyone needs to be a mathematician either, and we don't use that as a basis to tell people not to learn math. Much like math, coding can be abstracted to a form of thinking in a way that plumbing cannot.
I have a friend right now that is using CodeHS to teach 10 year olds, and they're absorbing it like sponges. And I have met so many people that, in retrospect, have wished they had learned to code at a younger age. Maybe if people had told them to learn how to code, they would have.
Saying programming isn't about code is ... insane? Maybe you can be a programming manager without knowing how to code, kind of? You'll likely be a bad one.
This is the kind of thing you say after you've been coding for such a long time that you've forgotten how challenging it is to learn to code for most people. Sure, once coding is not the main challenge, you move onto new challenges like coordination, collaboration etc. But if you can't code, then you aren't a programmer.
More concretely:
Managing communities and collaboration is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a programmer.
Coding is necessary to be a programmer.
You know we live and work in some sort of dream land and 99% of people in other jobs don't have anywhere near this level of freedom and bargaining power.
You will sell yourself short by forgetting this. Coding isn't guaranteed to stay like this - as tooling gets better and better and more people get into it we will be seen less and less like wizards.
Coding is an important skill to develop. But I'd rather develop my ability to NOT write code.
To choose libraries I won't have to mess with. To DRY up the architecture so I'm not implementing the same thing 5 times in a higher layer that would be trivial in the lower layer.
To not encourage sprawling piles of code by making sure there's one obvious way to to the things that need doing.
Shitty code will just teach me to code. But I already know how to code. I've been coding for a while now.
I don't need to be any better at writing average crappy code. I need to be better at writing bulletproof code that is as close to bug free as it can get, and architecting to prevent the need for shitty code.
Should musicians be lazy in their practice? Everyone outside of tech says you will play how you practice.
So if they encourage shitty code... you wonder if they really are all that committed to making bug free apps, or if they are dragging the old WorseIsBetter anchor.
I mean, once upon a time, UI design and digital composing were "coded". Slowly things get hoisted out of deeply technical domains, or at least, such that someone talented at other things can apply their type of technical knowledge. An artist generally makes a better UI designer than a programmer.
What I don't like is the trend of teaching people to almost reach their goals, without also teaching them how to fill in the details that the "Do What I Say" tool cannot.
What would be a more laudable and practical goal would be something that eases people into more advanced programming, or points them down different paths that are associated. It is useful to know "No, I don't want to do this, but
So in the end, I think the "No code" movement is just the latest iteration of sky high dreams. It looks like training wheels, but it is anything but.
There aren't enough people who go into coding because most people simply dislike coding. I've seen it many times and don't blame them. I love coding, but dislike chemistry and statistical analysis. It's just not my thing
Since this is likely not going to change, these no-code tools expand the number of workers who can do stuff. But it clearly isn't as good as coding and never will be
As a developer, I agree with this. Huang may play a marketing game here, but he’s right. “Coding” isn’t something humanity needs to do, because coding in textbooks and coding in reality are two different things. Our IRL coding is a bunch of self-inflicted and cheered complexity and an artificial barrier that secures the jobs. AI has a very good potential to distill coding back to the essence and then some more. Not the current AI, but 2024 isn’t the last year of humanity either. So coding isn’t dying, but coding as we know it should die anyway. Should have, long ago, but it’s so compelling to just stay in a comfort zone of being a software developer. He claims everyone will be a coder, and that I find realistic. Of course people incapable of even easiest levels of “STEM” will exist, but the bar will lower dramatically.
I took a bunch of time and focused on helping coders instead of coding myself. I came to coding naturally and never thought of it as much more than intellectual self-stimulation. It was a lot of fun, and there is some value to it -- but it tends to get a lot more attention than it should simply because it feels so good to do it well. Successful startup founders say that coding is no more than 2-3% of the total effort of providing value to people. I've found nothing to prove that false; and I've seen a lot of companies and startups.
Recently I'm back to focusing more on coding. I find two things most interesting:
1. As I get older, I struggle with attention span and short-term memory more, but I have greater ability to see deep and widespread cross-cutting patterns. It's probably an even trade.
2. I'm not so sure that smart people should be coding. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that good coding is managing cognitive complexity. You're always trying to make it work, then make it easy to understand and maintain. When I think back on all of the multi-billion-dollars I've seen in project/program disasters, none of it was because the problems were hard. They were all a combination of poor customer/user participation and smart folks taking a problem of n complexity and making it into a problem of n^n complexity. Usually the two were related: tech was constantly used as sort of a band-aid to fix people problems. It never worked, but it kept a lot of coders employed for a long time.
Hopefully this wasn't cynical. I love coding and I love making useful things for people. I have a deep passion for helping developers lead happier and more productive lives. But I also feel an obligation to be honest about what happens. It looks a lot different at 50 than it did at 25.
Think about it. Seriously, would you want somebody telling you that you wasted three years of dev time and could scrap what you have and roll something useful to production in a month? I've done that several times in my career, at various ages, and nobody ever liked hearing it. As I got older they liked hearing it even less. In this business, inexperience, raw intelligence, and enthusiasm are the things we reward. They come mostly with younger folks.
Tech development is amazing and incredible because we create our own realities. But part of that awesomeness is the fact that left alone, we create realities that look like ourselves. It is the nature of the work.
But I think learning to code is important because it is what attracts creatives, and both creatives and engineers are needed in development.
You're guessing here (and you admit it), but I'm a very strong data point for the opposite. Anyone who knows me would tell you I'm creative (I started out, and still am a filmmaker and it's all I'd do if I could afford it).
I had thousand of hours of computer science before I wrote my first line of code, at age 20, and I didn't seriously get into coding until I was 24.
So no, I don't think coding and creativity have any link whatsoever. I find CS extremely creative and enjoyable, much more so than coding, which I consider to be "S" work in the Myers-Briggs taxonomy. When I want to be creative, I step back into CS mode.
Your comment makes the implicit assumption that code exists entirely for the purpose of powering a business. Code is also a creative medium for expressing ideas and the craft of programming in and of itself is of interest to many people.
Only a very tiny portion of creative work requires actual programming, like demo scene programmers. Even video games and Pixar movies have far more artists then programmers. It's true that more and more programmers are required to extend and maintain the software, but the growth of the end-user base has far outpaced the programmers. The majority of programmers are implementing business logic of which they have minimal high-level creative input.
The things we can do with computers without code has only increased. Pontificating on how it would be better if we didn't have to write code is like someone who once used a circular saw pondering why can't artisanal wood carving also be done with simple straight-forward, easy-to-use tools instead of difficult-to-use hand tools. I mean its crazy how often we hear this refrain about coding as opposed to other professions. No one asks why can't we have a gadget to perform an appendectomy at home instead of paying a surgeon thousands of dollars, but for some reason people think that coding is somehow unnecessary magic which could be done away with by a bit of clever rethinking. But code is not some rube goldberg device designed to obfuscate and impress; code is a medium, like a blank canvas, or a sheet of typing paper, the only difference is it can control physical things. It is not one concrete thing with a specific purpose which can be optimized like a word processor, or a stove, or a faucet or a car. Less code doesn't mean a simpler world, it just means less of what code can do.
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