[danso]

Concurrent with learning to code, I've often wished that my co-workers would at least learn how to write parseable documents.

I don't mean something as structured as XML. I mean something as simple as keeping notes/numbers/links in a spreadsheet, which enforces at least some degree of information integrity (why are there a bunch of missing/ambiguous dates for these incidents?). And if it's done well, then all it takes is a simple script to parse that data into something usable, either a webpage or an interactive report.

Theoretically, it seems like you could learn to do that without learning to code. But maybe once you've learned for loops and if statements, it's much easier to understand the value of parseable documents.

[rohamg]

This is an important philosophical question: should humans become better at communicating in machine-parseable ways, or should machines become better at parsing human communication?

[dbaupp]

Preferably the latter, but human communication is inherently ambiguous and heavily sensitive to context, and so actually implementing this is really hard* and thus the former is actually (slightly) feasible at the moment.

*In fact, probably impossible: how often does one have to actually ask the author what they actually meant? Not appropriate for offline computer processing.