Everyone, we hear these days, must learn to code. Being able to program computers is the only way to be sure a computer can’t steal your job. So doctors, dancers, drivers and dieticians must all acquire programming skills, and coding needs to be at the centre of modern secondary education. Well, evidently it is in the interests of giant technology corporations to have future generations of employees educated to their precise specifications at the public expense. The message is amplified by journalists anxiously extrapolating from their own predicament. (Generating ‘content’ is an increasingly unrewarded dead end; the cool things are data and ‘sharing’.) But the all-must-become-programmers idea does imply a rather weird future culture. If everyone spends all their time programming computers, who will till the fields? Who is going to produce literature?
If you can’t code, saying such things risks a charge of Luddism. Luckily, I can after a fashion, having learned on a small black plastic box with blocky monochrome graphics and a laughable 1K of memory: the ZX81, launched in 1981 by Clive Sinclair.
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