I understand Jeff's motivation for writing his piece.
Alas, I just hope people learn to code if they want, or don't if they don't want to. That's all. No one else can make the decision for them.
I also go out of my way to teach people coding concepts. I recommend Zed's books to beginners. I recommend stackoverflow or quora for asking / answering questions.
Just be helpful to beginners and help them ignore the rabble rousers until they've got their bearings.
All this blogging and tweeting on the subject is just going to confuse folks in the early days, when they should be focusing on learning instead.
I understand Jeff's motivation for writing his piece.
You mean that he's trying to revive his blog now that he's out of the stackexchange thing, building a readership that he can monetize in the future? Hence these sorts of confrontational, pablum entries that bizarrely make the front page of HN. I don't get it.
If these were usenet posts they would never, in a million years, see any attention.
I've never understood why coding horror gets so much attention. Every article usually fits in one or two buckets. The first type is an inflated, long winded, well marketed article about a ridiculously simple topic or idea that tries to sound more insightful than it is ("Look at how well designed my new cat food dispenser is.") The second type is when a more controversial subject is broached, like performance tuning or computer literacy, and the result is always the same: shallow analysis, often peppered with completely incorrect statements, a massive blowback from people who know what they are talking about, then a series of retort posts that dig the hole deeper until the meme finally burns off.
Alas, I just hope people learn to code if they want, or don't if they don't want to. That's all. No one else can make the decision for them.
I also go out of my way to teach people coding concepts. I recommend Zed's books to beginners. I recommend stackoverflow or quora for asking / answering questions.
Just be helpful to beginners and help them ignore the rabble rousers until they've got their bearings.
All this blogging and tweeting on the subject is just going to confuse folks in the early days, when they should be focusing on learning instead.