Sometimes I hear from other professionals, "it has become impossible to talk to IT professionals, what they talk it sounds like gibberish".
There are lots of efforts for better connecting to customers, like developing good functional languages for requirements, but then we have got non functional requirements which still need to be clarified with customers, and again the gibberish problem.
Then I have thought, what could a world look like where creating code is something considered to be literacy?
Or, nevertheless interesting, what could have been its history and how many centuries might it realistically take between the event of writing the first digital computer code and say 95% of adult population have programming skills at the level compared our society is capable of reading and writing?
We do not have to start from zero, I am still collecting facts for reality check if such society could indeed be possible, as constraint based on free will (more or less).
So these are my considerations so far:
- In our today's reality, US courts make no difference between say French and Java.
- It's worth to know, large layers of a society may become literate before the state enforces compulsory public education laws.
- Today's "programming literate" people could be as I assume vaguely related to say GitHub users. By this, there are (as of April 2020) about 30 millions programmers out there. That corresponds to 30m/7bn=0.43% of the world population.
- How many developers are there? (closed question)
What are basic programming skills in this context?
- Be able to instruct computer/robot/bot/drone in a programming language of your choice.
- Be able to read and understand codes created by other entities.
Image: development of world literacy (as seen on History SE).