I have recently come to realize that for people who don’t code, “coding” sounds like something different than it is. It sounds like a craft. It sounds like pottery, or knitting. It sounds hard to do, and designed to create a specific type of object — a computer program.
A computer program is a useful thing, as is a pot, or a sweater, and some of them are even useful to lawyers. But it is not the job of a lawyer to make good sweaters. So coding seems a distraction from our job.
Here’s the thing: for people who have done coding, coding does not seem like a skill. Coding seems like a language used to communicate with the most efficient helpers available. Or, as David Colarusso said on twitter recently, coding is “expressing rules in an unambiguous manner.”