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A few years ago, I was riding on a ski lift with our Swedish exchange student. I asked her if she had thought about what she was going to do after high school. She said that she was considering engineering and had taken a programming class the previous year. I asked her what they taught. She replied, “Java.” I instinctively responded with “That’s too bad.”

Why did I say that? Took me a while to figure it out. It’s not that Java is a bad programming language; it’s actually pretty decent. I said it because of the way in which Java (and other languages) are typically used to teach programming today—without teaching anything about computers.

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Learning to Code is Only a Starting Place

Part of the reason for this state of affairs is that it’s not all that difficult to write computer programs that appear to work, or work much of the time. Let’s use the changes in music (not disco!) in the 1980s as an analogy. People used to have to develop a foundation in order to make music. This included learning music theory, composition, and how to play an instrument; ear training; and lots of practicing. Then the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard, originally proposed by Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland, came along, which let anyone make “music” from their computer without ever having to develop calluses. It’s my opinion that only a small percentage of computer-generated “music” is actually music; it’s mostly noise. Music is produced by actual musicians—who may or may not use MIDI to build on their foundation. Programming these days has become a lot like using MIDI. You no longer have to sweat much or spend years practicing or even learn theory in order to write programs. But that doesn’t mean these are good or reliable programs.

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This situation is likely to get worse, at least in the United States. Wealthy people with vested interests, like those who own software companies, have been lobbying for legislation mandating that everybody learn to code in school. This sounds great in theory, but it’s not a great idea in practice because not everybody has the aptitude to become a good programmer. We don’t mandate that everybody learn to play football because we know that it’s not for everybody. The likely goal of this initiative is not to produce great programmers but rather to increase software company profits by flooding the market with large numbers of poor programmers, which will drive down wages. The people behind this push don’t care very much about code quality—they also push for legislation that limits their liability for defective products. Of course, you can program for fun just like you can play football for fun. Just don’t expect to be drafted for the Super Bowl.

In 2014, President Obama said that he had learned to code. He did drag a few things around in the excellent visual programming tool Blockly, and he even typed in one line of code in JavaScript (a programming language unrelated to Java, which was invented at Netscape, the predecessor to the Mozilla Foundation that maintains numerous software packages, including the Firefox web browser.) Now, do you think that he actually learned to code? Here’s a hint: if you do, you should probably work on honing your critical thinking skills in addition to reading this book. Sure, he may have learned a teensy bit about programming, but no, he didn’t learn to code. If he could learn to code in an hour, then it follows that coding is so trivial that there wouldn’t be a need to teach it in schools.