Should I Learn Coding as a Second Language?

"I can't code, and this bums me out because--with so many books and courses and camps--there are so many opportunities to learn these days. I suspect I'll understand the machine revolution a lot better if I speak their language. Should I at least try?" Dear Decoder, Your desire to speak the "language" of machines reminds me of Ted Chiang's short story "The Evolution of Human Science." The story imagines a future in which nearly all academic disciplines have become dominated by superintelligent "metahumans" whose understanding of the world vastly surpasses that of human experts. Reports of new metahuman discoveries--although ostensibly written in English and published in scientific journals that anyone is welcome to read--are so complex and technically abstruse that human scientists have been relegated to a role akin to theologians, trying to interpret texts that are as obscure to them as the will of God was to medieval Scholastics.