Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and algoRithms. My wife and I were just brainstorming about this: how coding should be the next "basic" skill. Of course, someone was ahead of us and posted this . It is awesome to see Mozilla Hackasaurus referenced in this article. It is a small world. In the early days of the printing press, scholars wrote the books; the press was simply used for production (see this article ). As time went on, "average" people became familiar with the medium, and used it for their own messages. We are at just that point with the Web. Software Engineers write the code, and the Web distributes it. Software Engineers are the algoRithm scholars of today. They won't be for long. Soon algoRithms will be taught starting in elementary school, along with the other three R's.