Why policy professionals should still learn to program in 202X

The useful part

X Reasons for policy professionals to get into programming in 202X | R-bloggers [social4i size="small" align="align-left"] --> [This article was first published on Data Analytics and AI Archives. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? In 2019 I wrote a post with seven reasons policy professionals should learn to code.

How it works

• Not necessarily so you can write the code yourself, but so you can make AI a force multiplier for your work.
• Background In 2019 I wrote a listicle outlining why people working on public policy should learn how to program.
• I'm also a frequent user of AI in my work and find it has greatly expanded the scope and scale of what I can achieve.
• In the world of public policy, there's an almost unlimited number of interesting questions that could be asked, but rarely the time and data to answer them.
• Sometimes this is simply because the data didn't exist, which makes learning to code not particularly helpful.

What to take from it

Source: rogierK @ Twitter (post no longer available) Doing smart stuff quickly. Programming languages makes solving these problems trivial, but with the right prompt, so can AI. Salon (link) If you're wondering why I'm waxing lyrical about intelligence and the mechanics of LLMs, it's because I think they help decide two things: which problems AI is likely to be good at solving and whether (or when) it's worth learning to code.

Example or evidence

• For this post I asked AI for good search terms to find research exploring the cognitive and economic benefits of learning to code, so I could check my assumptions and think clearly about what has changed...
• Now that AI can write reasonable code, I've had a number of people ask me if it's still worth learning to program.
• While there's certainly a lot that could be said about the unfolding Marvel Universe's implication for learning to code, this will have to be a subject of a future post.

Details worth keeping

Giles, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers ]. So my answer is yes, learning to code still makes sense. Feel free to reach out if you have suggestions.

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• R Bloggers: You can read the original post in its original format on Rtask website by ThinkR here: We chose React to learn it.