Comment by conartist6

I respect the hell of those philosophies because of how far Linux and git have made it, which they've done by winning people over with good, solid choices. I would hope I'd be a good enough engineer to make the same choices if I saw the same things Linus saw 20 years ago. But it's 20 years later and I'm looking at the next 20 years and I see a different landscape and it causes me to have a different outlook. I think code literacy is a hugely important right now as a battle is fought over whether people will own their technology.

If many people are literate in code, the likelihood is far greater that they will own the tech and it will be open source and built according to principles that make software accountable to them. If most people are illiterate in code, they will become subjects to proprietary technology forced to use products which they have no control over.

The problem is that code literacy hasn't moved beyond the era where developers are people who own a physical keyboard and a full-size computer monitor, use a filesystem regularly, and are able to install and run native applications on their laptop or desktop. But here you've got the next generation of programmers who need to become literate in code (so that they won't become subservient to it) and for many all they have are touchscreens: phones and tablets. Maybe they're on a shared device where they can't or don't want to install software. They might not know what a filesystem or x86 machine code is. That's why I'm on mission to make code literacy and the ability to contribute to open source a matter as simple as having a screen and a browser.