I found Atwood's original article misguided. There are tons of intangibles that go into the process of learning to code -- it teaches logical thinking, mental multitasking, long term and short term planning, community contribution, and generally makes you a more intelligent, more deep-thinking person. I sort of see his point, which is that not everyone should be churning out production code that is distributed and used by a lot of people, but when people say "I'm going to learn how to code" they mean it the same way they say "I'm going to learn how to cook". It's strictly self-improvement, and I support it 100%.