You Should Learn to Program: Christian Genco at TEDxSMU

earlier this year reddit user cs-nl posted this question to the internet reddit my friends call me a scumbag because i automate my work when i was hired to do it manually am i csnl was hired to do manual data verification and fixing on this gigantic excel table rose and roosevelt he was hired in this department of a bunch of people whose job it was for eight hours a day five days a week to just do this to a giant excel table and they were pretty good at it the typical daily output was six to ten

records a day with about 90 accuracy now csnl knew some basic programming so he wrote a computer script to literally do his entire job for him the script that he wrote completed over a thousand records a day with 99.7 accuracy he replaced an entire department in a weekend of coding now i know what you're thinking all right smart kid stupid company they should have just hired a programmer in the first place because this data manipulation thing is what computers were designed to do but i want you to think for a moment about the place where

you work and i want you to think about what it is that most people are doing there when they're working chances are it's probably a form of data manipulation and it looks a lot like this and this if it hasn't already happened i don't know what it is that you do it probably will happen soon this has already happened to architects and doctors and even things that aren't even remotely related to computers at first like painting um and in some cases computers have completely replaced the person entirely did you know we used to hire people

to stand in the middle of intersections and direct traffic we used to hire people to print out yesterday's news and hand deliver it to us to our homes we used to have stores that you could go to to borrow analog copies of movies and rent them out and they would charge you late fees if you didn't return them in time ridiculous like what and there are still a lot of societal problems that we're facing that don't make sense in a world with computers like textbooks really heavy books you can't search through they're not linked to

other things or paper forms that people just retype into a computer or classrooms why should i go to a classroom when i can watch a video on youtube and i can fast forward through the boring parts and rewind through the other parts there's a lot of problems like this in society that don't make sense in a world with computers but what can you do about it well to answer this question i would like to travel back in time to the year 1961 the year we decided to put a man in a giant can and send

him from earth to the moon but we had a problem the amount of calculations you would have to do to coordinate this incredibly complicated rocket system to actually get you there and into the right orbits was way too much to do by hand but nasa engineers were very smart they built one of the most advanced computers of its day the apollo guidance computer to do these calculations for them they did that with this how many people in this room have one of these how many people don't like one guy in the back your cell phone

in your pocket right now has the computing power to do the calculations for one million apollo 11's simultaneously now i couldn't fit a million apollo 11 little graphics on the slide but if you can imagine this slide repeated this many times and then this slide repeated this many times that's how many apollo 11s your cell phone can do the calculations for nasa scientists in 1961 would have fallen to their knees and worshiped you like a god for having this kind of technology and what are you using it to do there's a disconnect between the technology

that you have available to you the problems that we're facing in society and what you know how to use that technology to do so with this in mind i've come up with a clear call to action which is that you should learn to program now there's a lot of studies that say that if you repeat something you're more likely to remember it so if on the count of three i could get everybody to say i should learn to program one two three but why why should you do this thing you just agreed to well i

have three reasons why number one is that programming literally makes you smarter what you're probably thinking to yourself is why should i learn the program why did i just say that um which is a good question but it's probably also what people were saying in the 1940s about 19 and the 1400s about reading and now that you know how to read don't you think it's really convenient that you don't have to rely on someone else to do all of your reading for you it's really handy that you're able to have this mental process this mental

tool that you can use to extend what you were otherwise currently capable of to apply it to other problems and computers are really good tools for extending what you're capable of if a computer scientist if someone with a little bit of programming experience has a problem of not wanting to go to the video store they can make a website that streams video straight to your computer if people are having problems with textbooks and a programmer says oh i have an idea i'll make a website where everyone can edit it and it's immediately available to everyone

online they can do this if someone doesn't like asking people if they're single they can make a website that just lists that for all of their friends um a common side effect of solving these kinds of problems as a programmer that sometimes you become a multi-billionaire but even if you don't invent the next facebook knowing the basics of programming is really good for your basic fundamental tools of thinking like being able to break up a really big problem into really tiny pieces or being able to iterate over something really quickly and make small incremental changes

or being able to find a little tiny problem in a big complicated system even you know if nothing else you'll know enough about computers to stop listening to what a talking paper clip is telling you to do and just start actually understanding how the computer's working they didn't get this joke at tedx kids um we're getting old but most importantly learning how to program will let you use your computer's full potential and this is only going to become more true as computers get faster and cheaper which brings me to my second point which is the

computers are getting better faster than you are there's this law in computer science called moore's law that predicts that every two years processing capacity of the average computer will double double every two years how much smarter does your brain get every two years you're still much smarter than a computer but for how much longer the futurist ray kurzweil estimates that by 2025 you will be able to buy a computer with the computing capabilities of a human brain for a thousand dollars but even more amazing than that is what you can buy today this is the

raspberry pi credit card size computer it started shipping earlier this year for 25 dollars 25 for a computer what imagine the things you could do with this if you knew what to do with this 25 you could plug one into every washing machine and have it text you when your laundry was done or plug it into every toilet in your house and congratulate you for peeing for a really long time um i did that it was really fun which but you wouldn't know what to do with it if i gave it to you because this

is what it looks like when you turn it on which brings me into my third and final point which is that you're lazy but what you don't realize is the computer programmers are some of the laziest people on the planet if there's a job that a computer scientist has to do that takes 10 seconds every day a computer scientist will spend months making a tool for himself that can shave five seconds off of that but when you're first learning how to program it's going to seem like a complete waste of time you're going to be

learning things like how to get the computer to do math for you and how to get the computer to type out words for you things that would be much easier if you just did them yourself but if you stick at it if you can program for an hour a day after about a month you will reach this magical point where it's actually faster for you to program the solution to a problem than it is for you to do it yourself and all of a sudden life will just be magical if you have a problem that

used to take you hours or days you can code up a solution in minutes you will have this enormous capability of processing vast amounts of data and extending what you're otherwise currently capable of to solve these huge problems you'll have the complete freedom to code up solutions that have never existed before with no one telling you that you can't and you will feel inspired to become a programmer don't i want you to go back to whatever it was that you were doing before you started to learn how to program and i want you to bring

back these tools that you've got from programming and apply it to that i want you to rethink how people are currently doing what you're doing there's a lot of people in the world that can program but there's none that can also do what you know how to do now how do you get started well google just google how to program online there's a ton of free resources if you don't like any of those i made a list on my website of some of my favorite ones it's my name christianco.com and you can uh start learning

i'd like to close now with one of my favorite quotes from someone that totally would have been a programmer if computers had existed when he was alive henry ford once said if you have a difficult task to do give it to a lazy man and he will find an easier way to do it you