Why programming is an essential skill
2022-12-22
As our world becomes increasingly dependent on technology in general and computers running software more specifically, the divide between people not throughly understanding the used technologies and those who do gets larger and larger. In this article I am going to present several arguments why programming should be considered an essential skill these days...
First and foremost, I believe that learning at least a basic level of programming provides a very valuable deeper look at how computers work in general. Therefore it makes using these technologies easier as you can understand how a certain outcome is generated and what parameters effect this outcome.
The second argument of mine goes hand in hand with the first one. The knowledge of progamming allows you to better understand the limitations as well as possibilities of the software they depend on and therefore set reasonable expectations without being overwhelmed or disappointed.
Furthermore, being able to program allows you to solve urgent problems yourself without depending on someone else to do it for you. This provides a very important layer of freedom and independence many people just overlook in the light of how difficult they consider programming to be.
This perfectly transitions to my last but certainly not least argument, which is that programming is not hard as many excellent free tutorials exist and that it basically does not matter which programming language you choose as the core principals are mostly the same anyway.
TutorialsPoint and W3Schools are very good resources for that and even something graphical like Scratch is fine in the beginning. Nevertheless, I would personally advise you to start with JavaScript or Python , if you want an easy start into a very friendly and large community, or even better with something very low-level like C , if you want to really get into the details of how computers work and understand things from the ground up.
Hopefully, this small write-up convinces you to see programming as an essential skill and be proud of youself, if you already learned it, or start learning it know, if you have not learned it yet. As always, getting started and training regularly is the most important as well as hardest step, so feel free to get moving now...