Is coding really the language of the future?

What makes coding a revered skill? Nothing except brilliant marketing strategies that the technology companies have deployed to make us believe that it is invincible and is the only future ticket to an established professional career.

Sana Syed

The plethora of advertising jingles and taglines playing intermittently on our television screen create needs and demands of insane proportions and we inadvertently become consumers. While the industry pushing its product is invariably the winner, consumers have to ponder whether they happen to be smart buyers or foolish hoarders.

The latest idea selling like hot potato on the electronic media is the tagline ‘coding – the language of the future’. Pardon my naivety, but hearing that it rather seems people of tomorrow would be talking in terms of html symbols and not accepted languages.

Yes, with gadgets and digital devices becoming no less than the oxygen needed to survive, it is becoming increasingly convincible that coding skills would be required to fill in jobs and there might be a surge in the demand. But it is needed to be cleared that as not everyone who drives an automobile is a mechanical or automobile engineer, similarly we would not need to require coding in order to use an application or device.

So, what makes coding a revered skill? Nothing except brilliant marketing strategies that the technology companies have deployed to make us believe that it is invincible and is the only future ticket to an established professional career. It is a queer scenario where most parents apart from the ones in the technology sector are not skilled at and find technology a little tough to understand, which makes them vulnerable to the fear of future unpreparedness and an easy target to the vast market of coding courses.

The data provided by the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that within a decade (2019-2029) there will be a decline in the employment of computer programmers by 9 percent, which is a significant chunk.

Imagine, brands like WhiteHatJr pushing for coding classes from Grade 1, meaning thereby that before children learn how to read and write, they should learn to code. I find it insane and enslaving that before the child learns to explore the world around, he/she should be constricted to the gibberish world of coding.

It is very interesting to find Apple’s CEO Tim Cook lending his voice to market coding classes for early grades on social media platforms like Facebook, and on the other hand, by his own account admitting to limit the use of technology for his own nephew (he does not have a kid).

Surprisingly he is not alone, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Satya Nadella all have had limited the use of technology for their own children. An article published in The Independent in 2016 by Doug Bolton needs a special mention where he has quoted Chris Anderson, the co-founder of drone manufacturer 3D Robotics. Anderson said his children accuse him of being overly concerned about technology and he further added, “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself. I don’t want to see that happen to my kids”.

Coding is not a skill in isolation. In order to code well, children need to develop good writing skills, logical thinking, a knack of problem solving, abstract thinking to visualize the end code, steady memory to remember hundreds of rules, and tremendous patience to make it work. All these skills require a physical environment and an appropriate age to develop and certainly six or seven years of age (Grade 1) is not that threshold.

The virtual world of computer screens can provide simulations but not real experiences. Over the years, tech companies have been constantly pushing the education industry and lobbying for more computer based learning, undermining the prevalent teaching techniques. So, there is a need to evaluate who is the ultimate beneficiary of such an overhaul.

In the US, technology initiatives date back to the 1990s with the goal to translate that into well paid jobs when the students entered the workforce. While statistics are inconclusive on the outcome for students, the equipment and software needed to teach them brought huge business to the tech companies that took their net worth to US$ 4 billion in 1995. Around 30 years of industry push has not brought the desired outcome for even the tech companies with their dependence still continuing on skilled immigrant workers from across the world.

The idea of raising entrepreneurs who make million dollar apps and settle in life like the tech moguls we admire, is definitely a dream we all cherish. But we should also be aware of the fact that less than 0.01 percent (1 in 10,000) of consumer mobile apps was considered financially successful throughout 2018.

With more ventures into the field, the competition would further get grinding. Building mobile applications is a complex process where the cost of building an app is high, plenty of apps are launched on a daily basis, and most are available free of cost, which make them harder to monetize. It is an intricate and integrated process of multilayered planning and execution that makes up a successful and sustainable app. The typical cost range of developing an app is $100,000 to $500,000 as stated by software developing companies while small apps with basic features could cost from $ 10,000 to $50,000.

Coding is based on learning programming languages and they have been evolving at a rapid pace. In less than a decade, new languages evolve pushing the old ones into oblivion. A little research would reveal over 250 existing programming languages with distinct functionalities. The good point about all these complex sounding data is that efforts are on to make them simpler and understandable to people with even basic computer knowledge.

There is hardly a need to panic and overburden children in their nascent years of education over abstract ideas and commands. If first generation learners, some with no professional computer science degrees with majors in other fields of engineering, can master coding skills with dexterity, why would the children born in the computer age remain inept in it?

Before introducing technological learning we need to develop a scientific cognizance among children to absorb the skill in its essence. Schools like the Waldorf School of Silicon Valley that surprisingly tech entrepreneurs prefer to send their kids to, does not allow devices until Grade 8. Certainly, as parents they would also be preparing their children to be pathbreakers in their respective fields and surely coding does not seem to be on their priority list.

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