Programming is creative expression. It enables you to communicate your ideas to others – giving those ideas life by wrapping them into a digital user experience that can be tried and shared.
Programming endows your creativity with value. An idea by itself is worthless, as any seed-stage venture capitalist will tell you (the people who specialize in investing in ideas). But if you express your idea through a usable app, and you’ve just created something from nothing. That’s value creation – and potentially wealth creation, if enough people agree that it’s useful.
So learning to program doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to be a professional programmer. You may just be trying to express yourself – to share your great ideas with the rest of us. Your day job or school studies may have nothing to do with technology.
Or maybe you want to be an entrepreneur. Unless your startup idea requires no digital component (very rare these days), you’ll need tech skills – for marketing, for distribution, for services, for something. The first thing non-technical entrepreneurs often must do these days is to find technical partners that can actually execute that great idea.
And there’s never been a better time to learn how to program. There are so many resources online to teach yourself with – instructional websites, YouTube videos, ebooks, etc. Whether it’s iOS 5 (iPhone/iPad), Android, HTML5 & JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, Java, or C# (and many many more), there are an enormous number of choices available to you at little or no cost.
Recently, I’ve chosen to focus on HTML5/JavaScript, iOS 5 (iPhone/iPad), and Ruby on Rails – but that doesn’t mean there are right for you. Pick whatever suits you. If you have no idea where to start, then it’ll be hard to go wrong with HTML5 and JavaScript in the years to come.
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