Bill Gates wrote his first program at 13 – the game “Tic-tac-toe” in the BASIC programming language. It wasn’t until I started my computer science studies at the university Geneva that I started coding in Pascal. It wasn’t “Hello World,” not even the Variables, Constants & the Assignment Statement but making the computer obey my commands that amazed me the most. I created amazing programs and continued coding in Fortran. Fortran was fantastic in helping to dive deeper into numeric computation and scientific computing, and I was at my highest level of excitement.
Knowing to code was beneficial in many ways. I later realised that it helped open my brain to critical and system thinking. My mindset was full of radical innovation, which guided me to navigate the tech world to create value through emerging technologies. Coping with technological advancement with continuous skill optimisation and building high-performance teams were among the most enjoyable tasks that always made me remain a high-performing individual.
My daughter was coding in Scratch when she was in primary, and in high school, she started coding in Python. The more she put her hands-on coding, the more she became skilful in mathematics, and her problem-solving skills flourished.
I feel so fortunate that I learned to code as a young person and cherished it. But masses of intelligent human beings in no way found out to code due to the fact the software program wasn’t as soon as standard as it’s miles now. These days, dad and mom are pushing their children to research programming at a younger age because they recognise that in the future, their children will compete on a worldwide stage in a marketplace in which most jobs are automated.
Then comes Web 3.0, the semantic web where AI will dominate with the natural language processing ability. In my book, the Ultimate Modern Guide to AI, I wrote very clearly that, “These days, elementary school students learn English and coding at school. Tomorrow’s elementary school students will learn AI. AI comes before English and coding. This is because artificial intelligence is the language and tool of the future.”
But adults, even successful CEOs, can benefit significantly from the knowledge of coding. It can help in many areas, but I will focus on how knowing to code can make one a great leader:
- It makes you a critical thinker, which involves the skills you use to examine ideas, present and analyse arguments, categorise information, interpret meaning, and draw conclusions.
- It adds technological sophistication that provides a new perspective of leadership to lead technical teams.
- It will oblige you to learn something new, and I never stopped learning.
- It helps you to make value-oriented decisions.
- You will be able to maintain a competitive advantage in the future market, as you’ll be able to create new ideas/products using emerging technologies because “how to code equals how to create”