Communications of the ACM
A Surge in Learning the Language of the Internet
Zach Sims, left, and Ryan Bubinski started a business called Codecademy to teach people computer code.
Credit: Richard Perry/The New York Times
The market for online classes in programming, Web construction, and application development is booming.
Many people are finding that the jobs they have held for years now require being able to customize a blog's design or manage an online database. "Inasmuch as you need to know how to read English, you need to have some understanding of the code that builds the Web," says investment manager Sarah Henry.
Many Web sites and services catering to the learn-to-program market have been launched in recent years, such as Codeacedemy, which walks users through interactive lessons in various computing and Web languages, showing them how to write simple commands.
"People have a genuine desire to understand the world we now live in," says Codeacedemy co-founder Zach Sims.
The growing interest in programming is part of a national trend of people moving toward technical fields. The number of U.S. students who enrolled in computer science degree programs rose 10 percent in 2010, according to the Computing Research Association (CRA). That figure has been steadily climbing for the last three years, notes CRA's Peter Harsha. "To be successful in the modern world, regardless of your occupation, requires a fluency in computers," Harsha says.
From New York Times
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