To encourage new coders should we adopt a new approach?

Does anyone need to be encouranged to do anything? Expose kids to programming when they're young, give them resources and opportunities to learn and the ones that are interested will get deeper into it; and some of the people who don't pick it up when they're young will come back to it later in life. Everyone else can go about their life and pursue the things that they like instead of being encouraged to do whatever.

More and more school districts are teaching coding as kids grow up, so they already know it is a skill they can use for work. Just like everything else they learned in school. And those who love it are pursuing for work, while those who do not are going other directions.

All of that seems fine to me - it may be worth considering that when coding is integrated into your worldview as just one tool among many, not everyone will pick it out as the tool they want to dedicate their life to. And based on how many angry, cynical, burnt-out coders exist in our industry... the fact that some young people are not pursuing it may be a healthy choice.

Are there enough coders already?

For me coding is not a love story. It can be fun bit mostly it takes absurd amounts of time, time I would rather spend doing something fun and exciting. No, living in your head creating imaginary worlds isn't what I consider being fun.

Music creation, DJing, dancing, hanging out with people, traveling is more fun.

Coding is a means to an end, something to get me closer to the goal of not having to work because my income comes passively.

It's not a good life. Staring at the screen for hours days weeks years. It's imitation of life in every sense. Slavery even.

Also why do you care if people decide to be coders? Let them do what makes them happy

Programming is fun, but learning to program from zero is boring. And that's partly because the way it's being lectured.

Learning to program it's like learning to speak a new language. And learning a new language is boring when all you can do is completing some monotonous exercises with no evident real life use.

It's 2022, computers have become way bigger and complex since 1980, and "look this device can prompt for a number in the terminal and multiply it!" Does not excite everyone anymore.

Also, the distance from "hello world" to "use your coding skills creatively" is really high, and a lot of people just bail before they get to that goal.

We should play more with integrated circuits, where a few lines in C, Go or Rust can generate something tangible, ann slowly raise the level to effective modern code.

Humans learn through experience, with actions and with the expectation of some feedback with results. Solving a buttloads of mindless exercises that have no distinctive purpose is not a good way of learning

Thanks for starting this topic. I'll chime in - not as someone who codes - but as someone who has tried, on many ocasions.

As some comments mention - one of the biggest AHA moments to have is - learning programming must occur in parallel with a goal. Anecdote time - i'm an obsessive music collector, and not long ago discovered mp3tag's regex functions. Mind...blown - i read the tables describing the regex actions many times - it all felt like gibberish - kept trying....and BAM! it clicked. I can almost guarantee learning anything like this without the strong motivation to avoid manual retagging - would not nearly work as well.

Contrast the above - with my current position - working my way - incredibly slowly through Harvard's CS50 - nested for loops make my brain spin out. But just recently - i kept looking for intro explanations...and found a flow chart. With a flow chart in hand, looking at the sample code in one of the code examples made so much more sense.

There is such a plethora of learning materials out there in regards to code - i feel that there is gradually more improvement in clarity of explanation for people like myself (who dont "just pick it up").

The area I feel needs the most work is small exercises which build on the exercise before it. Please no more cryptic puzzles (python challenge was actually super fun - but the concept behind just randomly googling - VS - applying something i've learnt...seems off?)

I would love something like "maths exercises" but for code. perhaps i've not looked hard enough?

Contrarian thought:

Is this what we want to do?

With things like GitHub CoPilot, numerous no-code solutions, coding being codified, etc. how much skill and demand is there looking ahead?

I wonder if the future is as bright as the pass. Perhaps it's just me.

That may help. In college I knew a math major who used python to simulate physics for his presentations, so that kind of marketing may help. The problem is it needs to be taught in a way that makes sense for different people's use-case. A person using it for math will not be using it in the same way a biologist would, and so on.

I think we need less programming languages, and less evolution in their development. So that actually doing something with said languages becomes interesting again ;)

The legion of folks who learned to code via geocities/neocities websites/tumblr themes are a fantastic example of this. :)

No because more new coders would drive salaries down.

As a developer who enjoys being paid a butt-load, I propose we raise the bar even higher.

Why do you want new coders? We want more money