Engineering and Maths are hardly "IT type" positions. For something you consider so insignificant, you'd be surprised at how many courses require at least a semester of programming. At my university, in regards to undergraduate degrees, except for Law and Arts, the majority require at least 1 semester of some form of programming. Even within Creative Arts (which at my uni is actually seperate from arts), if you are a Graphic Designer, Visual Arts or Sound Production student, you will spend at least 1 semester doing a 'programming like' course, which is more like scripting rather than fully fledged programming.

I'm not saying that programming is something that everyone needs to learn, nor is it something that most people will ever need after higher education, but if you view programming as an abstraction (just like learning any subject), there are skills taught which apply to various aspects of life.

Your point seems to be "skillset is not commerically viable unless you are applying for a job which has its main focus as skillset," which is an extremely crippling approach to education and business.

Now, if I had not put the word "commercial" into my original post or had it been a different word like "intrinsic" most of what you just said would be relevant. If you want to believe that learning programming has an intrinsic value to an individual then I'll give you that, but so does reading Hamlet and studying the effect of the flywheel on a crankshaft or even playing video games for that matter. You can argue that someone gets "something" out of all learning efforts regardless of the nature. Saying that an individual would beneift by learning programming logic is no more useful than saying that she would benefit by learning to speak another language. Obviously some value is gained almost irrespective of what's learned.

Universities, by definition I believe, must offer a more well-rounded education requiring students to take a variety of different courses regardless of major. That's what separates them from more technical colleges that focus on honing very narrow skillsets. Just because a curriculum requires a computer science class or mathematics class or social science class doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually required by the occupation(s) related to the major (or even useful in it) but rather it's required by the university itself to provide that balanced education.

As for my referring to Mathematics and Engineering jobs as "IT type positions," well done. You've set up a very nice strawman. Or maybe it was accidental. Either you deliberately misinterpreted by reply to set up a strawman or you failed to infer its context, both of which reflect poorly on you. Don't do either again please.

1. Download and install JAVA. Just follow prompts, webpage also has directions if you want more details.

2. Download and isntall TEXTPAD. www.textpad.com Again follow prompts.

You can easily google how to for anything you want to do and learn. This is the best way to start programming on a higher level language. It's easy to learn, comparitively speaking, and is completely free. Most university start here as well.

 Btw, don't the people on Ubuntu forum usually recommend Python for beginner programmer?

My previous comment was that Engineers, Mathematicians and number non-programming IT posistion require programming during the job. You replied with "I should have given a higher level designation to include those types of IT positions." My assumption was that you included Engineers and Mathematicians who do any programming as IT types. If not, you ignored the first part of my comment, which if taken seperately (i.e. Engineers and Mathematicians aren't IT related), invalidates your initial point anyway.

@Words of Wisdom:

i was reading your post and i thought the exact same thing as katilian that "engineers and mathematicians" are "IT type positions. you're the one who didn't make it clear. i was quite shocked when i read your response.

i don't know what it means for a skill to have "commercial" value. my closest guess would be "realizing that doing program development as a primary source of living is just a job as tedious as being a cash register attendant, with a pay that doesn't seem to compensate for the amount of work and effort put in to develop that skill" translates into little commercial value since it doesn't "generate" other income for the developer himself.

so you can argue that, say, the idea behind youtube has commercial value, but the person(s) who implemented that idea added little commercial value to the original idea. this point is debatable, however, since without knowing what can or cannot be done by programmers shape the feasibility of many ideas in the first place. in terms of coming up with algorithms, say the algorithm has "commercial" value. i guess then, the coding of the algorithm does not. but to me programming includes the design of algorithms, not just coding. and even with coding, you can sell pieces of code. like development platforms or libraries. to me that's basically just pieces of code, but they still have commercial value.

anyway... you sound like someone who's frustrated at having written programs for too long... either that or you got disillusioned or decided to quit programming in college and do something entirely different, i have no idea. you have some very strange perspective on programming.