Programming: The New Literacy
Anyone who has been around me in the last few weeks has heard me preach about how great it was to learn PHP and be able to build stuff myself. In one of those preaching sessions with my friend Eric he suggested I check out this article about programming being the literacy of the 21st century. Needless to say it’s a great read and one I’ll need to do a proper writeup about at some point soon. In the meantime, here’s a nice paragraph from the piece:
“One might ask, ‘Will every educated person really have to program? Can’t the people who need programming just buy it?’ Possibly. Of course, with that model, we have in a sense returned to the Middle Ages or ancient Egypt, or even before. Then, if you needed to communicate your thoughts on paper, you couldn’t do it yourself. You had to hire a better-educated person — a scribe — who knew the writing code. Then, at the other end, you needed someone to read or decode it — unless, of course, you were ‘well educated,’ that is, you had been taught to read and write and thus had become literate. “