All great reasons, but there's one I would add as an MBA: Learning to program makes you a better business person.<p>How?<p>Made to Stick has a great story about a math teacher who struggled to convince his students of math's importance in life. As he put it, math is like weight lifting. You don't work out to prepare for the day a rogue barbell comes and traps you on the ground, you work out so you can run faster, tackle harder, and jump higher. Math is weight lifting for your analytic mind - it helps you rationally think through problems and establish logical steps to the solution.<p>Learning to program, and to take it further, learning computer science, is not about making the best app ever created. CS is mental weight lifting on the _process_ of tackling business problems. Dissecting an app into its MVC components will help you understand the business you plan to create, what is core, and what is fluff. In other words, learning to program will make you a better business person, even if you suck.
I think the world would be a better place if everyone, especially MBA's had at least some knowledge of programming. With the state of the job market in the US, wouldn't it be wise to require even two years of programming in high school?
That's a good idea. My advice: forget the MBA. Just learn to code and start making contacts in the field you want to go into. Why pay grad schools? YC is the new grad school, and they pay you.
Coming from a similar perspective as the OP, but so far I always failed to go through with actually mastering a language. Over the years I attempted to learn so many different ones, from Action Script to Assembler, from Delphi to C++, but always became either bored of it after a few hours or got frustrated because the ideas I had in mind turned out to be far more complicated to realise than I had hoped for.