There was a recent posting by Jeff Atwood titled “Please Don’t Learn to Code“, which received a lot of recent discussion. It’s a bit silly, to me, because the impetus for that post—a tweet by NY Mayor Bloomberg suggesting he was going to learn to code in 2012—was almost certainly sent out as a promotional message for a NYC-based company (CodeAcademy), not as a sincere expression of the mayor’s side interests. In any case, Atwood’s piece came across to some as unnecessarily harsh, and while it’s hard to argue that everyone should learn to code, it’s also elitist to suggest that people should’t learn X because they’re not going to be able to do it in a way you think is right.
The reason I mention Atwood’s piece is because Rands in Repose had a very nice reaction post titled “Please Learn to Write“. Maybe it’s because I am a writer, but the suggestion—Hey, if you want to improve yourself, communicate better.—rings true to me.
