Learning to code is still worthwhile

July 6, 2026

Is there any point to learn to code in the age of vibe coding?

Literally no one is uttering what we thought were the immortal lines “learn to code,” right? I don't think that sentence has been spoken for many months now in Silicon Valley Making Sense with Sam Harris #481

I'm the founder of Val Town, a "Silicon Valley startup" for writing and deploying code, and I still believe everyone should learn to code.

Sam is right that “learn to code” is no longer trotted out as a quick path out of poverty. The ability to string together two lines of JavaScript no longer guarantees you a 6-figure-salary.

This is also true of math, literature, science, or any of the liberal arts. Like those, coding is worthwhile to learn on educational grounds, not merely vocational ones.

I grew up hating math. I stumbled into an after-school program that taught programming. Through it, I fell in love with math, and excelled at it beyond my wildest dreams.

Later, I learned this experience masterminded by a math & education researcher named Seymour Papert. He wanted children to learn math like they learn to speak: through exploration instead of instruction. He started from the assumption that we all know it’s impossible to be congenitally “bad at French”: if you grow up in France, you’ll learn it. So Papert tried to create “Mathland”, a place where anyone could grow up “speaking math.”

The Mathland he created was the LOGO programming language, where you can draw pictures by giving instructions to a turtle on the screen with ink on its feet. I recently made a version of it you can try out online. Can you figure out how to draw a circle?

Through learning to program, I learned so many meta-skills, like debugging, composition, and logic. Most importantly, I learned that there’s literally nothing that cannot be learned. These meta-learnings of programming may explain the unreasonable competence (and arrogance) of computer scientists: why we think we can solve all the world’s problems – even those far outside our original domains.

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