Trendspotter: the learn to code movement

In the medieval German city of Mainz in 1436, Johannes Gutenberg set up a small print shop. Books were rare, precious objects in early 15th-century Europe. New volumes were usually made by scribes who copied text by hand, and a single book could take months to produce. But the new system Gutenberg had invented - utilising moveable, metal type - meant that in his little shop, he could print thousands of pages a day.
From Mainz, Gutenberg's printing press had spread to 270 European cities by the end of the century. During that time, 20 million new books were printed. Widespread availability of cheap books led a new age of ideas: the Renaissance. Gutenberg's machine had helped cause a revolution of world historical significance.
Today, we are amid another such revolution. Its point of origin is not Mainz, but the San Francisco Bay Area. And at its heart is not a human language but the language of computers. More specifically, the set of languages commonly known simply as "code".
This year has seen the rise of a movement pushing a single idea: that all of us should learn computer code. Proponents say that we live in a world that, increasingly, consists of digital technology and virtual spaces. So if you're unable to communicate with a computer - unable to instruct it to do anything that Microsoft or Apple hasn't sanctioned for you - then you're a bystander in this revolution. You're the medieval refusenik who declined to learn to read. Inability to code - so runs the argument - is the new illiteracy.
Late last year, the learn-to-code movement gained a manifesto in the form of Program or Be Programmed, by the media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. "For the person who understands code," says Rushkoff, "the whole world reveals itself as a series of decisions made by planners and designers on how the rest of us should live."
Now, a host of start-ups are moving on to the field of play. The Chicago-based Code Academy (www.codeacademy.com) provides free online lessons in the JavaScript programming language. One month after its August 2011 launch, six million lessons had been completed. When Code Academy declared 2012 "Code Year" (www.codeyear.com), the New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg tweeted that he'd signed up. Overnight, the movement went mainstream. Meanwhile, the London-based start-up Decoded (www.decoded.co) made headlines when the Google chief executive Eric Schmidt praised its innovative one-day coding courses.
In the same breath, Schmidt warned that the UK must improve teaching of coding in schools, and pointed to another start-up, Raspberry Pi (www.raspberrypi.org) - the manufacturer of a US$25 (Dh92) computer meant to help children learn to code - as part of the solution.
There are those who disagree. The popular tech blogger Jeff Atwood (www.codinghorror.com) sparked an online debate in May when he wrote a post entitled "Please don't learn to code", in which he argued that learning to code is not a productive use of time unless you plan on becoming a professional coder, and that Mayor Bloomberg would do better to concentrate on his day job.
But that position looks like a minority one. It is increasingly clear that across the next decade, entire industries are set to be transformed by code. Journalists, for one, are already running scared from Narrative Science (www.narrativescience.com), which creates software that turns vast data sets into well-written, English-language news stories. Similar technologies are sure to disrupt health care, education, finance and even government.