While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.
Doing some programming on the side as a hobby or as an adjunct to other professional work is "on track" with what the computer science luminaries from the 70s were saying.
Though... I've often said Excel is a programming language, only that you get to program a data-flow virtual machine one cell at a time. So... I think more people are programming than know it.
I remember the exact moment I first discovered recursion. Some fantastic individual in our early 90's school district had arranged for LOGO clubs to be created in various schools, and even had a little competition at the end of the year.
Recursion was, apparently, the thing my team didn't know how to do to make those nested squares one of the problems required :)
Given that LOGO is a Lisp dialect, that sounds resonable.
I keep hearing about m-expressions, and think about how they're similar to the LOGO syntax (though I don't think they're exactly the same.)
Worth reading if you haven't heard about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression
Especially if your biggest critique of Lisp is "all those annoying parentheses."