The Relevance of Programming Today

With the CBSE now including programming as an optional subject for middle school in its curriculum, and popular educational services such as Byju’s and WhiteHatJr. providing programming courses for students, it’s quite clear that programming is making waves in nearly all fields of education. This begs the question: why is programming (otherwise thought of as a mundane and niche field) just now gaining so much popularity and how is it relevant today?

The answer to this question is quite unsurprising, and it lies in the fact that technology is now developing at unimaginable speeds and is closely intertwined with our daily lives. However, programming is also gaining popularity recently due to several other reasons. Programming and computer science are some of the few fields which can successfully be worked on almost completely remotely, and given the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, this ability has been extremely useful now more than ever. Besides this, working remotely provides more freedom and accessibility to employees. In light of the pandemic, programming has also enabled scientists to use features like data science, data visualisation, and prediction models to effectively combat the pandemic and also assist the vaccine rollout worldwide.

Moreover, computer programming also greatly benefits a lot of other fields such as medicine, aviation, space exploration, communication etc. with applications in almost all industries. For instance, programming has helped the field of medicine lately by using data analysis for epidemiology and immunology, predicting trends in COVID cases and even training machine-learning models to identify cancerous cells from image samples. Additionally, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have used computer programming to develop a groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence model to detect asymptomatic COVID-19 infections (that show no medically discernible symptoms) from voice recordings alone!

Not only is programming an extremely useful skill, but it is also one of the few skills that one can teach themselves, with thousands of online resources, free courses and accessible material available across the internet at the click of a mouse. Being a highly application based field of study, one can surely become a proficient programmer by working on fundamental skills along with different projects that require diverse skill sets.

From websites to apps, and from AI to robotics, programming has limitless possibilities and grants a developer the ability to channel their creativity into a productive and practical outlet and to bring their ideas to life. This prospect of creating something entirely new and original from scratch makes programming not only highly interesting and rewarding but also stands as a testament to the fact that with knowledge, dedication and a few lines of code, anyone can bring about change for the better.

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