Val Town's founder: learn to code as a liberal art, not a six-figure ticket
Steve Krouse traces his love of math not to a classroom but to Seymour Papert's LOGO, a language that let him explore numbers instead of being taught them.
Steve Krouse's claim: code is a creative medium that fuses the creativity of writing, the precision of mathematics, and the instant feedback of a video game, and its real payoff is meta-skills like debugging and the belief that nothing can't be learned.
A developer of thirty years isn't sold: if the best pitch for coding is that it's like math notation or as pretty as a violin, then coding is in serious trouble.
Papert's Mathland, not a bootcamp
Steve Krouse, who founded the coding-tools company Val Town, wrote on July 6 2026 to defend an unfashionable idea. As AI dissolves "learn to code" as a get-rich-quick shortcut, he argues the skill is still worth acquiring: not as job training but as a liberal art, the way you'd study literature or logic.
His own conversion story is about math, not code. He credits Seymour Papert's LOGO language and its "Mathland", a place where you learn mathematics by exploring it rather than being instructed in it, with turning a subject he'd hated into one he could play in. Programming, he claims, teaches meta-skills that outlast any language: debugging, composition, logic, and above all the conviction that there is literally nothing that cannot be learned. Code, in his framing, is a creative medium that fuses the creativity of writing with the precision of mathematics and the instant feedback loops of a video game.
He meets the obvious AI objection head-on. LLMs write English as fluently as they write Python, yet nobody concludes the humanities are therefore worthless. Learning to write didn't stop mattering when everyone got a word processor.
"Nobody employs code monkeys"
Not everyone accepted the pitch. One reader traced the backlash to how the skill was marketed in the first place:
The problem is that coding was sold as the pancea. If you were fired, 'learn to code', if you're in prison, 'learn to code', if you're in kindergarden, 'learn to code'… You don't see welding being suggested as a form of excercise, or the ticket to being a multi-millionaire.
The romance in Krouse's framing drew a harder rebuttal. A developer of thirty years found the aesthetic case self-defeating:
If the best we've got for convincing people to learn to code is that it's like math notation (the most hated part of math for the uninitiated), or pretty like a violin (useless for a new grad), then coding is in serious trouble.
Others thought the essay dodged the economics. One commenter argued the value question can't be waved away:
Software is the bottleneck for a vast array of economic activities… Unless you're doing so as a hobby with no expectation of returns, I'm not sure what, if anything, is worth learning anymore.
And one reader rejected the whole genre:
I absolutely hate these blog posts. They always miss the point entirely… 'Knowing how to code' has always been poorly defined and full of silly arguments. Nobody employs code monkeys.
There is a conflict of interest the thread was quick to name: the man arguing you should learn to code sells the tools you'd use to do it. Whether that discredits the liberal-arts case or merely explains who still has a stake in it is left to the reader.
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