introduction
Software is essential today. It’s hard to think of any industry where software isn’t changing practically everything about how work is done. Manufacturing needs software to monitor production and shipping, let alone the robots that increasingly perform the actual task. Advertising, politics, and fitness, among others, are awash in big data and they routinely use software to make sense of it. Video games and movies are created using software. We could go on and on, but you get the point.
The result has been that more people than ever want to learn how to program. We’re not just talking about the computer science, computer engineering, and data science majors at universities who have been in a perpetual “enrollment crisis” for the past decade. We’re also talking about the scientist who needs to write software to evaluate their data, the office worker who wants to automate some of their tedious data processing tasks, and the hobbyist who wants to create a fun video game for their friends.