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thejewbana:

Hey Friends

Okay. So this is re: my blog post from a few weeks ago “Let’s talk Trees” about hard copy submissions and why I think they are a huge problem in the submitting world — So, today I got my StageSource reminder telling me to submit to Fire House Center For The Arts and I thought…

Ben said it more eloquently than I ever could… coding exercises a different muscle in your brain than marketing does, and it feels good.

—

Jeff Atwood, “Please Don’t Learn To Code”

Ben Says:

This is one of the dumbest things I have ever read. 

The article is conflating “coding” with “professional software development”. Learning to code teaches you, among lots of other things:

• Divide and conquer
• Boolean logic
• Debugging
• Analytical thinking
• Logic flow
• Details!

When a programmer gets requirements from a product manager or business analyst, they are ALWAYS incomplete. The edge cases are NEVER identified and none of the “what if” scenarios are played out. 9 times out of 10 it is up to the programmer to understand the nuances, to take things to their logical conclusions, to consider what happens in the case of N=0 or as N approaches infinity. 

These are all skills I use EVERY SINGLE DAY, not just when I code, but in solving problems in life. Broken toilet? How do I figure out where the problem is? You bet I’m going to divide and conquer that shit (pun intended)!

This kind of thinking helps me in everything that I do in life and it wasn’t until I learned to code (in college, mind you) that I started thinking this way.

Do I want my son to become a computer programmer? I don’t care. Up to him. Do I want him to understand how to think critically and logically and in a structured & methodical way when approaching problems? Absolutely. And computer programming teaches these skills better than anything else I’ve ever done.

(via benjaminsteinpro)

(Source: evan, via benjaminsteinpro)