Sourcegraph strategy

Background

For thousands of years after writing was invented, most people remained illiterate. Universal literacy seemed unlikely. Is it really possible that every human would be capable of reading and writing? How would literacy benefit the average person? As we now know, every human is capable of and benefits immensely from literacy.

More recently, around 1976, just 0.2% of the world’s population used computers. Two tiny companies sought to make computing universal: Apple’s vision then was to create a “bicycle for the mind” in the form of a computer, and Microsoft wanted to put a computer “on every desk and in every home”. Though it seemed unlikely at the time, as we now know, everyone is capable of and benefits immensely from having a computer (or a phone).

Today, only about 0.1% of the world’s population can code. That tiny group has built software that runs the modern world and improves the lives of billions of people. Think of the possibilities if everyone was able to code. All around the world, more people would be able to solve problems and improve their lives by building software. We don’t know exactly what these billions of coders will create, but we know that billions of coders means faster and more broadly beneficial technological progress.

FAQ

If we want to make it so more people can code, why are we focused on professional software developers instead of people learning to code on small projects?

By starting where the complexity is greatest and the problem is biggest, we can create a solution that will scale up and down to all of coding in the future, rather than just make already relatively simple coding projects even simpler. This mission is on a timeframe of 30+ years, and we think starting here is how we will have the biggest impact in the very long term to make it so everyone can code.

Will we be creating coding classes, new version control systems, new programming languages, etc.?

No. We aren’t so arrogant to think we know how to do that best for everyone and every problem. We want to create a code intelligence platform that lets you use the best tools for the job and that makes them all work together well, so that every dev can understand and write code better–and ultimately focus on the problem they’re solving, not the millions of paper cuts along the way.