When J was was much younger, I made episodic efforts to get her to learn some basic programming and work with data. My own programming days were well behind me by then so those efforts bore little fruit. Notwithstanding, I continued to espouse the cause of learning to code as a basic skill no different from reading and math.
Clive Thompson has it exactly right as far as why coding is good for anyone no matter what you personal and professional interests in life - there is no one who could not benefit from automating grunt work out of their lives. He says to those who do not intend to become career programmers:
But there’s a whole other possibility — which is to learn just a bit of coding.
This can have a surprisingly delightful impact on your life. Because while it’s hard to become a hard-core professional programmer, it’s quite easy to — like me — learn juusssssst enough to do something quite valuable:
To automate incredibly tedious, boring tasks in life.
I hope at some point a good Samaritan like Thompson will put together recipes that lazier folks could just use as-is to eliminate drudgery from their lives.
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