New lingua franca. Why is the whole world learning to code?

Today marks the day when I joined the British Computer Society as an associate member, having completed one of their qualifications and successfully passed the exam. Yes, of course it made me feel a little proud, as I’ve now joined the group of sought-after information designers and innovation visionaries who turn lines of code into life-changing pieces of software. Nothing that I can do.

I come from a social sciences background combined with love for natural languages, hence programming languages have always attracted and interested me immensely. To me, English, French, Twi, PHP or Java are all equally beautiful and useful. No matter how you call it, it’s a language and it serves the primary function of communication, of passing bits of information from one node to another.

This is why I was so puzzled by a colleague who proudly stated she started learning how to code in a room full of “non-techies”. Let’s admit it, learning to code is trendy. It is quickly becoming more important than learning interprersonal skills, or in fact any other foreign language. Why is that so? What’s so attractive in coding and programming languages that some campaign to teach them to children at schools?

Perhaps it’s because people increasingly recognise the fact that in the future, they will have to communicate with machines more and more. We’re increasingly relying on them, that’s true. But they all come with interfaces making it easier and easier to use devices without even basic IT skills. Think about iPads and how 2-year-olds quickly get how to use them. With machines being easier to use, this argument seems to fall flat.

Perhaps it’s because we want to understand machines better. Maybe we’re motivated by the idea that knowing a bit of code will help us fix a broken machine or piece of software, without the need to call for outside help. Sometimes dictated by practical conditions, this approach looks to me equally dangerous as self-medicating on grounds of a couple of online medical portals.

Perhaps there’s a bit of a creator in all of us and this is what drives this approach. It would be so nice to know how to code a small, useful app or a website script, wouldn’t it? Quite romantic, but all too often ended in disappointment and disillusionment. And if it doesn’t, it quickly gets bought out by resourceful giants.

Perhaps the motivations are more down to earth. Maybe the huge demand for programmers and coders drives supply, attracted by high salaries and stability. Or even, for some writing an app that gets picked up by a major investor became the 21st century equivalent of winning a lottery.

All these arguments remind me all too well of what’s often cited as the benefits of learning foreign languages. Yes, you’ll be communicating with people from different countries as globalisation moves forward, yes you’ll understand them better if you speak their language, yes you’re more likely to get a publishing deal if you write your book in English and yes, you’re likely to be more competitive on jobs’ market if you speak another language, especially English.

Is coding becoming the new lingua franca then?

It’s a good idea to know your way around, especially with the view of the possibility that one day we indeed may need to communicate with machines in a human-computer globalised village. It seems reasonable to know how programming languages work. Is it essential to know them fluently? No.

In the world of natural languages we have skilled translators who take words in one language and produce a coherent, readable, working target text. These are the people who work on books, websites, confidential documents. The same role should stay with programmers. All of us can go back to learning basic holiday expressions or translating song lyrics for fun.

Plus, we all know that some of us are simply better at languages than others. Why would it be different with programming?