2026-10-22: I found these old writings when I was cleaning up some stuff and added them here.
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There are many reasons as to why everyone of the current and future generations should learn to code. The major one of them being given is that computer programs are running many of tasks responsible for comfortable life yet many people don't know how it works.
When told about learning to code, people fear it by thinking that they need to learn complex mathematics to learn programming or they need to dedicate their life to be good at it. They even start picturing themselves as a fat person sitting on the sofa in the basement drinking red-bull while concentrating on his work.
Let me tell you one thing. Learning to code does not cause any of the above things and it sure as hell doesn't require complex mathematics. In other words:
You don't need to dedicate your career to programming to add programming to your career.
Now let's talk about few reasons (5 to be precise) why you should learn to program.
1. It teaches one to think logically
Logical thinking can be helpful to anyone in any part of their life. What programming is is actually thinking logical steps as to what instructions do I need to give to a completely logical machine (which is dumb in every other aspect) to make it do the work I want done.
2. You can build tools
Let me tell you the story of a programmer who got a job of manually filling an spreadsheet based on data from another spreadsheet. All his colleagues in his department were assigned similar task with different spreadsheets. Instead of entering all this data manually, what this person did was write a program which did it for him. Thus both increasing his work-efficiency and decreasing error rate in the work done by him. Similarly we also can use programs to automate some parts of our work if we think hard enough.
3. Enables you to give life to your ideas
You know there wouldn't have been Facebook around if Mark Zuckerberg didn't know how to code. He had a great idea of building an online portal where people can connect to their peers and share details about their lives. But the idea wouldn't have taken shape if Mark Zuckerberg was unable to code, since initially no one was that positive of this idea.
4. Allows job flexibility
Programmers are the people most readily associated with the Digital Nomad lifestyle which is a dream of many people. And it is rightly so, since we mostly don't need to be present at any particular place in-person and can do most of our work from wherever we are through the use of a beautiful thing called Internet. Even when we need to meet a client or someone else, we can easily do it using a video call.
5. Teaches persistence
The last one is the least glorious of the bunch, but by no means is the value added by it to your life any less than the rest. Many a times, your program won't behave as you expect it to. It would throw errors that you can't make head or tail of, these are the trying times when you need to keep your head cool and think straight (logically). Sometimes such problems are solved within a few minutes, but it shouldn't be a surprise if it takes a few days. The real thing is that you shouldn't give up.
Not sure about slow, but you sure as hell need to be steady to win this race.