MIT’s professor Mitchel Resnick puts coding before the cart of literacy, “To thrive in tomorrow’s society, young people must learn to design, create and express themselves with digital technologies.” And we have covered it. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of www, thinks the lawmakers should also know coding. He believes it is crucial that politicians appreciate the technical capabilities of computers and that a knowledge of coding is key. “We need more people in parliament who can code, not because we need them to spend their time coding but because they have got to understand how powerful a weapon it is, so that they can make laws that require people to code to make machines behave in different ways.
Literacy is the ability to read and write in a specific language. Power of a language depends on the opportunities it offers. That’s why the Arab-Latin fusion was central to the dawn of modern civilization. Carly Fiorina, then CEO of HP, elaborated it at the end of her speech: Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage. The technology industry would not exist without the contributions of Arab mathematicians.