Artists and designers should know how to code. There, I said it.
Now, I could go into a good in-depth exposition on how the artist mindset and the developer/engineer mindset aren’t all that different, or how the image of the “non-technical artist” is a relatively recent phenomenon. Those are topics for another article. For the purposes of this article, suffice it to say that knowing a little code will not only give you a better understanding of how your digital tools work, but that knowledge will help you create your work more efficiently.