Editing Community Data Science Course (Spring 2015)/Day 1 Plan (section)

=== Why Programming and Data Science ===

The question of who controls our technology, our information, and our data, is increasingly the question of who controls our experience of the world and each other. Programming is the power to define technology. It can be in, this sense, deeply empowering.

In a technological and data driven world, being able to programming and data science is a kind of literacy. Imagine a world in which everybody could read by only some people could write?

Our goal here is not turn you into the programming equivalent of novelists or journalists. Our goal is to demystify things and give you enough information to become dangerous.

Programming, you will also find — probably a little today and a lot more later on — is also enormously fun. For me, it's like meditation and problem solving. It's exactly as frustrating as a difficult puzzle and even more rewarding because your solution accomplish something else you were trying to do.