We Don't Need More Programmers, We Need Better Tools

When people suggest teaching everyone in school to code, nobody (or at least nobody sensible) is suggesting that some large number of those people actually go into programming as a profession. Instead, it's because the basic critical thinking and problem solving skills required to solve even simple programming tasks can vastly benefit people in other walks of life.

Already, any real scientist will need to code in rudimentary ways as part of their job. A linguist will need to be comfortable with unix text processing tools and probably python. A physicist will know enough FORTRAN to write novel simulations using the vast swaths of mediocre FORTRAN code written by physicists before him. This level of working knowledge is the ideal; it's what the mediocre programmers already flooding the field maxed out on, and it would be just fine for them if they took advantage of it in a different field. A person in any field can benefit from knowing how to code (as is demonstrated by the wonderful generative art and generative writing produced by artists and novelists who can code).

Mathematics is mandatory in school not because high school graduates are going to go out and perform calculus daily while they make change for customers at McDonalds, but because (at least in theory) if they can learn to solve word problems they can learn to reason about things like state lotteries, ponzi schemes, and other tricks hidden out in the real world that prey on people who are unable to think clearly and deeply. Elementary programming experience teaches that kind of thinking far better than word problems do.

(There's one more utility for universal CS education, which is that it opens up the possibility of high-paying CS jobs to people with natural talents who are stuck in socioeconomic situations that prevent them from having adequate exposure to computers. This is relatively wide-spread, even in the united states -- poor black families without computers at home, living in areas where computer access through schools and libraries is heavily limited. By producing a system that expands exposure explicitly to those groups, because of scale, you almost guarantee creating the circumstances that produce a handful of really skilled people who would otherwise have never had the necessary early exposure and would have spent the rest of their lives working in an industry that didn't benefit from their genius.)