If you were going to move to a foreign country, you’d probably make an effort to learn the language. And yet so many of us live our lives in front of computer screens limiting ourselves to the technological equivalent of pointing and gesturing.

We can get our basic needs across with just a mouse and cursor, but we’ll never truly understand computers—or get them to do exactly what we want them to do—unless we learn the language of code.

Now, in 2012, a New York City–based start-up called Codecademy is aiming to bring programming skills to the masses. During what the company is calling Code Year, students will get an interactive online lesson emailed to them once a week. The service is free, and by the end of the year the company says that students should have a solid working knowledge of JavaScript, a widely-used programming language.

So far over 300,000 people have signed up, proving that there’s a lot of interest in talking to technology on its own terms.

—Michael Moyer

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]

