Why People Need to Learn Programming

The great thing about software development is the word, “development”, because it entails a process.

It’s about making something that’s just enough to suit your personal needs — a website with just your profile and your blog and sections for just enough blog post categories to cover all the subject areas of blog posts you have — until the point you need to change it to fit your new needs over time. This is what makes programming essential to learn.

Though not necessary to get started, learning optimizations can help keep your original work functioning for a very long time — which is why people offer premiums for people familiar with optimization. This is why software engineers are vetted by being quizzed on using basic data structures — there comes a time where you need to make something new, something more efficient, and that rests on one’s knowledge of fundamental data structures.

But the fact that you can add new features is an important aspect of learning software development and its process. Imagine a world where people can fix any problem they have, because they can go into the source code of their “thing” (assuming everything is connected to the internet at this point). This is a society that has eliminated transaction costs related to finding specialized workers — because each person is self-sufficient and can fix their own problems, so the time spent looking goes to 0.

Programming should control the actual functionality of “things connected to the Internet” — be it a toaster or a cell phone.

So in a way, having products that allow the user to change using programming to fit their needs would eliminate some tech jobs that are just capitalizing on asymmetric information, and be reduced to being called “middle men.”

We need to reserve patents and change copyrights language to allow for adjusting code and functionality, but not for coming up with a production with the intention to compete in the market — essentially strap on an MIT license of sorts on any product that functions using code.

A solution to the problem of not having access to source code would be to have no patents on technology — SaaS and PaaS companies would gain many millions more users, but watch as their product would be devalued with the spawn of competitor products and open source options (which I would probably use).

This is the next generation — the majority of the population would learn to code as the ease of learning programming languages increases. In the future, everyone will find a need to program — find a way to learn to program.

There is a need for products that allow users to change to fit their individualized needs — like for hardware or software that is meant to be part of “the Internet of Things.” This will create the demand for educational tech products.

And they would get into the mindset of making things, and making them quickly, without the worry of how long it will take, just taking action.

Nothing needs to be perfect from the start. Nothing.

There’s a great quote from an article I read that explains this: “Basically everybody working for 16 to 20 hours a day for very little pay, doing repetitive tasks that for one reason or another, computers can’t do,” Rushkoff says. “And these will be the lucky people, because at least they’re employed.”

(This blog post was written in 2016. I’m slowly porting over my locally saved blog posts to medium. It is incomplete and will be fleshed out in the near future.)