I wrote the letter below to my students this morning. I hope it will inspire you!

We all know that educated people need to be able to read and write language well. It's important to be numerate, too. 

As business people we have to be financially literate. It's why we teach accounting and finance at Booth. 

Digital literacy is increasingly important for business leaders. And, over the years I've discovered that many Booth students are digitally illiterate; or barely literate. This deficit will hold you back in your careers.

In previous classes, I've done polls of student skill with programming. On average, 5% of my students say they have made money as programmers. Another 10% self-identify as competent or hobbyist programmers. Somewhere between 80-85% in previous classes say they have little to no skill at programming. 

At first, I tried to remedy this by requiring students to develop a website or app using Ruby and Ruby on Rails. That was too stressful for some. So, we experimented with the no-code Bubble.io platform. 

But this is a class on new venture strategy not programming. 

So, last fall I dropped all programming requirements. 

To prove to students that programming was not outside their ability. I began to teach myself programming languages 3 years ago; when I was 60 years old. I shared my journey with students. How I crashed my computer. How badly my apps performed or how ugly my websites looked. We would laugh at my noob efforts. But I did it to inspire students who never took a CS course, who had never set up a programming environment, who had never hacked. I wanted them to feel empowered that they could do it, too. 

A couple weeks ago after reading Paul Graham's essay about starting Viaweb, the one we discussed in class this week, I decided to learn Lisp. I focused on a Lisp dialect called, Clojure. It's been rough going. Emacs is gawdawfulugly. Strange, since Lisp code is so beautiful to look at. Frustrating. Fun. 

And, this morning I was on zoom with G.D,  a friend in Wales who is building a mental health app. He'd never seen how you can open the web inspector on a website and play around with the text. 

So, on a lark (as G says), we decided to hack another friend's website. The first picture below is the official website for D.H.'s Do Lectures. The next picture is how we defaced it. (In the background is the GNU Emacs editor and the lein repl running Clojure in the Terminal.)

We were laughing like teenagers when we emailed the screenshot to D. (In case you don't know, changing the text in the browser doesn't really have any effect on the server. I would never hack a friend's actual site! It would cause too much stress. It's also probably illegal.)

For you own sake, if you can't program, take a class on programming. Play around with code. Laugh. Build something. 

Oh, my wife's on an annual girlfriends' trip in Scottsdale. I have nothing more important to do today than sit around in my Ruby on Rails hacker hoodie and do things like this  ;-)