Don't forget how to code

Cal Newport, best-selling author and Computer Science professor at Georgetown University, argued in a recent episode of his podcast that "we need to think explicitly about increasing our intelligence and maintaining our ability to hold attention in a way that we didn't have to in 2009."

He's reacting to the latests PISA scores conducted by the OECD, a global economic organization. The results show a significant downward trend in overall cognitive abilities at the same time as widespread social media access.

In the 1960s we moved from industrial agriculture to office jobs, and we soon realized that sitting down all day was not good for us. Newport suggests that reading one book a week is like calisthenics for the mind. Something that was once ubiquitous, like moving around while working on the farm or reading, now needs deliberate attention.

This got me thinking about programming. As software engineers, we will be writing less and less code. What are the problems that we are going to face once we don't need to twist our brains with the core concepts of computing: reading and writing to variables, conditional branching, and for loops?

A bit of LeetCode everyday might save us from a heart attack down the line.