Steve Jobs on learning to code

From Robert X. Cringley's "Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview":

When we were designing our blue box, we wrote a lot of custom programs to help us design it, you know, and to do a lot of the dog work for us in terms of calculating master frequencies with subdivisors to get other frequencies and things like that. We used the computer quite a bit to calculate, you know, to calculate how much error we would get in the frequencies and how much could be tolerated.

So we used them in our work, but much more importantly, it had nothing to do with using them for anything practical. It had to do with using them to be a mirror of your thought process; to actually learn how to think.

I think the greatest value of learning how to—I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer—should learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think. It’s like going to law school. I don’t think anybody should be a lawyer, but I think going to law school would actually be useful, because it teaches you how to think in a certain way, in the same way that computer programming teaches you in a slightly different way how to think. And so I view computer science as a liberal art.