Coding So Simple a Politician Can Do It

The big news last week: NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg has resolved to learn how to code in 2012, courtesy of startup site Codecademy.

So intrigued was I by the idea of a site that even a career politician would comfortable learning programming from that I felt I needed to look into this a little deeper.

Codecademy greets you with a friendly interactive window, inviting you to start by entering your name into the box. Presto - your first line of code. The second step has you calculating the length of your name, and in no time you're writing actual commands and understanding them.

This is the kind of site your grandmother could learn to code from.

Based on my brief visit I see two very strong selling points for Codecademy,

1. It's addictive. I am a professional software developer so it wasn't as if there was anything particularly new or exciting for me but I found it hard to navigate away from the site once I started following the simple onscreen instructions.
2. It's solid. You're actually learning what it means to program computers and how such things work.

That's not to say that you're going to walk away with the equivalent of a computer science degree... but more and more of our lives are being lived online and with the help of Codecademy you can understand that world just a bit better.

Codecademy has a site called codeyear.org where they are campaigning for people to make 2012 the year they learn to code. As of this writing, close to 300,000 people have signed up for that challenge.

Why should you bother to learn to code when there are so many people who will always be able to do it better than you? To borrow a line from GK Chesterton's classic novel, "The Man Who Was Thursday", when a character is asked why he is about to challenge a very dangerous man -

"Because I am afraid of him," said Syme; "and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid."