Eric M Russell (8/15/2012)
If I had to teach all college graduates one language, it would be SQL. It's more practical than C. Most all developers these days write at least some SQL, and most do it badly.If we teach non-programmers, folks like salespeople, managers, or scientists how to write their own queries against a database, without handing off their requests to IT, they can immediately start benefitting from that knowledge. It's empowering.
If you teach them C, they'll spend weeks learning how print "Hello World" on a console, will never use it, and will forget everything three months.
Can we also teach them how to request information from IT? If the average consumer provided the basics like a URL (isn't everything served via http?), what they have, and what they want (deltas from what they have) - we might be able to start providing solutions right away. Mostly now we have a session of 20 questions to qualify that they have no idea what they are asking for.
Coding "to the hardware" in a cloud makes no sense. I'm not sure we should want our customers writing queries/code. However, I agree that having some appreciation for process would make everybody more effective & efficient at work. Not sure how you teach that to those who don't already possess the skill.