If you have the internal drive to be a programmer- great, be one. If the idea repulses you, then do something else.
I don't really think there is all that much peer pressure for everyone to be a programmer.
In the past, however, there was. Back In The Day, "computer literacy" meant programming because computers often came with little more than a basic interpreter out of the box. This is no longer the case.
I think all these tools that let "non-programmers" learn to code are great-- because there's a lot of "non-programmers" who could benefit from it. For instance, ops people aren't necessarily "programmers" but they can use scripts to automate tasks that would be mundane and repetitive otherwise.
If an assistant wants to learn a macro language so that they can better operate spreadsheets-- wonderful.
I worked thru one of the online programming classes with a non-programming co-founder and I think she found it pretty valuable. She's not writing code now, but her understanding of what's going on with the product is much better.
I think its silly to pretend like everyone has the same level of programming skill (which was a hard lesson for me to learn, because it always seemed so easy for me, and I figured t would be for other people.) But its also silly to poo-poo on "non-programmers" wanting to learn some programming.
These tools are great. And this drama seems, well, also silly.
I'm a programmer. I would think any article saying "Everyone should learn marketing!" is silly, but I'd also think that "nobody should learn marketing except marketers" is also silly. I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing and learning everything I can-- because its something we need.
The way people are taught mathematics is mostly useless. It's a bunch of equation and calculation that people are doing by hand. Nobody is trying to identify problems, break them down, make hypothesis, and so on. With programming, we could take the usefulness of mathematics to a whole new level by breaking the bottleneck of calculation.
In the end, we may be able to produce even more mathematicians, engineers, and scientists at an earlier age, because they learn the skillset needed to be in those profession.
I recall some episodes of five minutes wasted by research mathematicians because they were unable to quickly multiply some 2x2 matrices in their heads.
Being able to perform the low-level skills like arithmetic very rapidly in your head helps tremendously when it comes to narrowing down hypotheses. You can often reject a hypothesis quickly if you are fast enough at doing some computations in your head.
So yes, more teaching of how to identify problems and break them down is a good idea. But you also need to be rock-solid in those elementary but fundamental skills, and you don't get there without a lot of practice.
There's kind of a reason why at some point we teach certain elements of programming by hand too.
Maybe I'm reducing your question but I think it's important to note the intrinsic value of teaching by hand vs. always incorporating automation by programming.
perhaps all sciences?
Or if the idea repulses you, think about why it is and change the world by changing how programming is done.
This is the show where everything is made up and the points don't matter.
In an age where many people spend 40+ hours per week in front of a computer screen, even a small marginal increase in a computer user's productivity could save them hundreds of hours a year. As a result, it seems like a completely reasonable investment of a non-technical person's time and energy to learn enough about programming to enable them to scrap together a program that allows them to accomplish simple tasks more efficiently.
Would a professional programmer be able to write better code more quickly? Of course. But would a person with zero programming knowledge even recognize when a particular task they are spending hundreds of hours each year manually performing could easily be automated? Probably not.
I guess the bottom line to the whole discussion started by Jeff is: Not everyone should become a coder, not everyone can become a (good) coder, and not everyone wants to become a coder. But if you really feel like learning to code is the only way not to get left behind in this rapidly changing world (vs just doing it becomes everybody thinks it's cool nowadays), go for it!
If you are building a serious business, eventually you will need to hand over the real development work, to real developers. This allows you time to do what you're good at.
