Had this debate with a friend a while ago ; we're both developers and have completely different views, I wonder what the HN crowd thinks about this.<p>IMO, today's "mainstream information knowledge base" already involves concepts that a few years ago would have been considered the domain of coders.<p>One example is the use of markup tags in blog comments (<b> and <i>). Granted, this is a simple concept to understand, yet it is the foundation of HTML.<p>As people are increasingly subjected to concepts like "markup language", and unknowingly end up assimilating them, how long before more complex knowledge is added to the mix ?<p>Keeping with the markup example, once you understand what <b> does, it's a small step to understand what <div> does. One applies style, the other structure.<p>With HTML5 being a "language" that allows infinite power of expression on the web (both structure and style), how long before students decide that this is a language that they ought to know, because it gives them the flexibility that existing tools simply don't ?<p>The success of Codecademy seems to confirm that given the right tools, the general public includes an intellectually curious bunch that finds it fun to learn these concepts.<p>What do you guys think ?
It is hard to define what the "general public" is in your post. But I will assume, that you mean, at one day will 50% of the population that has access to a computer will be able to code.<p>And from me, I think that is an easy "No". I don't know why they would want to either. A lot people are not interested in buildings things (physical or digital) and are not interested in how things work. If they were, then I think by this point the general public would know how a car works, but I would say most people don't have a non trivial understanding of a simple motor.<p>Moreover, I think you are highly overestimating the ability of the general public in that it is a "small step" from going from wrapping text with some kind of special marker (<b>,<i>, etc...) to change the font style to how a DOM and layout engine works. In my experience, obviously this is very anecdotal, it is hard to explain the difference between block elements and inline elements, margins and padding to people that are smart (at least in my opinion) and truly want to learn.
It simply takes too long to learn with today's state of programming. Simplified natural language programming <a href="http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/16/programming-with-natural-language-is-actually-going-to-work/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/16/programming-with-natural-...</a> may be what they pick up.
tl;dr;<p>Its funny, I've been thinking about this recently, and the conclusion I came to was, People doesn't need to code actually. Coding is the process to getting desired output, which can be totally abstracted out for most common tasks. Look at ruby on rails, It hugely reduces all the mundane tasks that programmers needed to do.<p>If programmers care about DRY principle, they won't design yet another shopping cart.<p>Look at google forms, Its so easy anybody can do it without knowing to code, imagine coding a form with same complexity within the time it takes to set it up. Its not possible.<p>So, my point is customers people want, nine in holes in their walls, not nine inch drills.<p>coding is kind of nine inch drill ;)
this is on HN front-page right now :
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15916677" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15916677</a>
I guess that depends on how loosely you want to define your terms. I'm a former homemaker whose writings on some emails lists were seemingly popular for a time. This led to a couple of websites. I eventually learned a little (x)html and css to manage my sites. I suppose you could define me as "part of the general public" and "someone who can code". But I certainly don't think of myself as a hacker or programmer and couldn't qualify for a job writing code, just like I know a little conversational German, can count to 10 in Russian, know a smattering of Spanish words and can read and write a smidgeon of French but I don't think I'm a linguist or even bilingual. I'm simply not that fluent. I just dabble.