Hi, my name is Ben and I'm the co-founder and CTO of Mobile Commons in New York City. 
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.
(Source: evan)
