What we need are more people who know what they're doing. I find it condescending to assume that we really need to coddle more people and make them feel good about coding. Do we need to make this same argument for electrical engineers, surgeons, pilots and air traffic controllers?

I don't mean to imply that the current software world is a cabal of highly-skilled geniuses who need preserving - it's not. From personal professional experience, it's, on average, a nuthouse of self-promoting Java idiots with a "dropout genius" mentality who have no common sense and are not nearly as smart or good at problem-solving as their blogs or resumes would lead you to believe.

However, I think it would another discussion entirely to ask if the wrong people feel confident enough to write code. The belief that we need to reach out and bring more people into programming, in a world where the average developer struggles to cobble together a web application that isn't full of basic security holes, is ridiculous.

Also, I strongly suspect all of these efforts to drag more people into coding are at least partly sponsored by industry, in an attempt to drive the relatively-high wage of a programmer down, in the face of a perceived increase in programmer demand.