I don't think there's much a debate about whether designers should code, I think it's more a matter of how much and what they should be responsible for. I absolutely think that designers should code and that a designer that codes well is best set for their future.
That being said, I think we're at a tipping point both with where Javascript is going, and how designers can contribute. I think it was far easier to start out as a hybrid designer a few years ago when many sites didn't use front end frameworks, relied on jQuery for everything, and hybrid designers were more or less given a bunch of templates used on the back end and told to much with those.
Now everything is an isomorphic web app, everything is React, or Vue, or whatever. Everything will be ES6 and use compilers. If you are a large service, eventually everything will be React components that transpool down to their React Native and React JS equivalents. I think it's going to be increasingly difficult to find designers who can contribute scripts for theses sorts of projects, and, in my experience, if a designer excels in these areas then they may not find themselves being deployed as a designer for much longer, favored instead for engineering work.
I think that instead, we should be preparing designers to prototype, to work with hard data sets, to expect them to design for interaction and for null states, and none of that really requires coding. I think you're just more cognizant of them if you're also a developer, but that understanding can be trained.
I don't think there's much a debate about whether designers should code, I think it's more a matter of how much and what they should be responsible for. I absolutely think that designers should code and that a designer that codes well is best set for their future.
That being said, I think we're at a tipping point both with where Javascript is going, and how designers can contribute. I think it was far easier to start out as a hybrid designer a few years ago when many sites didn't use front end frameworks, relied on jQuery for everything, and hybrid designers were more or less given a bunch of templates used on the back end and told to much with those.
Now everything is an isomorphic web app, everything is React, or Vue, or whatever. Everything will be ES6 and use compilers. If you are a large service, eventually everything will be React components that transpool down to their React Native and React JS equivalents. I think it's going to be increasingly difficult to find designers who can contribute scripts for theses sorts of projects, and, in my experience, if a designer excels in these areas then they may not find themselves being deployed as a designer for much longer, favored instead for engineering work.
I think that instead, we should be preparing designers to prototype, to work with hard data sets, to expect them to design for interaction and for null states, and none of that really requires coding. I think you're just more cognizant of them if you're also a developer, but that understanding can be trained.