It's obvious that coding is becoming a skill on par with math for its utility in the modern world.
If more people understand the fundamentals of coding, it will completely change the user interfaces and sophistication of applications in the future. People will be able to code up simple features and behaviours they need, for example.
It's not even that their minds are different from technically inclined people or that they're just dumb. It's just that they have OTHER occupations in life, and using a computer may be just a means to look up info, entertainment, communication or as a digital assistant.
Computers are deep, involved and time-consuming, once you scratch below the surface. And you generally don't have the time in modern life to be holding a full-time career AND to investigate the innards of computing systems, even just the software.
> It's obvious that coding is becoming a skill on par with math for its utility in the modern world.
I am not sure it's obvious, sadly. I feel like having a programming environment on your computer is similar to having a workshop at home. So you could repair and build many physical things yourself.
I can imagine an alternate reality where most people have workshops in their homes, and they repair most (and build some) of the stuff they bought themselves. But it's not the highly-specialized, consumer-oriented society we live in (actually, I think this was more true in the past).
In a similar way, I could envision a world where everybody routinely scripts their applications to automate and customize them. But the trend seems to go the opposite way, away from scriptability, to specialized, task-oriented applications. So I am skeptical this world will happen.
I would love coding to become a new form of literacy, and I am certainly going to treat it like that with my kids. But I currently don't believe many people will use these skills on regular basis.
Addendum: It's interesting that the very same companies that want everybody to code are the ones that don't want the software buyers to have to customize the applications themselves, so they could sell them the customization.
VBA does not get much respect, but there are probably a vast number of accountants, managers etc. today that write code in Office applications.
In my experience the number is far from 'vast'. But whatever the actual number might be, it is definitely much too small.
It's been added to the primary school curriculum in the UK. And annecdotally, a good number of my (20-something, recent univeristy grad) friends are finding that a little coding is neccesary for their jobs, even if it's not the main focus.
But it should be pointed out that the real socialist society was much more do-it-yourself than western capitalist societies are. Mostly out of necessity, but partly because people had quite a bit of free time and couldn't freely associate (and argue about politics on social networks). So hypothetically, if the communist regime continued to this day, programming skills would probably become much more useful to an ordinary person.
The "well rounded" argument works both ways!
Most people a few centuries ago used to think about the world without any scientific awareness.
There are still people like that, and there always will be, but people in developed nations with an education are far more scientific in their thinking as an average trend.
The same will be true of the analytical mindset for coding