Some have criticized the whole learn-to-code meme, most notably Jeff Atwood in his blog Coding Horror. “Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code,” he wrote. “But it’s not. Their job is to solve problems. Don’t celebrate the creation of code, celebrate the creation of solutions.”

Mr. Simms is unapologetic. “Think about it less as coding and more as algorithms,” he said. “Traditionally there are the 3 Rs—reading, writing and arithmetic. We think algorithms should be the fourth. Not everyone has to learn to code, but needs to learn the notions of algorithms, realizing what you can use code for.”

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Zach is a good guy.

Playing a JavaScript videogame in a Web browser sounds a lot more fun than Ruby Bootcamp: http://pandawhale.com/convo/2468/become-a-web-developer-in-just-10-weeks-order-now