I think coding has potential to do the same, but after 20+ years I haven't seen it change the average person's job and think it's less likely in the next 20 years than it was previously. The main reason is that the tools are moving away, making the burden higher: the GUI made this more difficult than when commandlines were in vogue, and tablets and phones make it even harder.
Programmers dump on Excel because people often use it as a database (even in capacities that should scare someone), but I think it's fantastic that it's one of the few things that has enabled an average user to wield a computer to do what they want. But, when working in an office, the average person thought I was the Excel guru because I could reference cells from other sheets and help them figure out why they were looking at #VALUE! I'm in no way an Excel guru, but tried to teach what I knew. I think they would have benefitted from a little bit of Excel knowledge, but the amount of training and time for them to learn and retain anything more than basic skills would be huge compared to the value I saw in the average job.
Yes, Tim Cook and Steve Jobs' roles don't require comp sci, but the jobs they had leading up over the last 30 years didn't need it, either. Tim Cook was working for IBM and Compaq since the early 80's before he was at Apple. He's had every opportunity to learn and leverage computer science (I wouldn't be surprised if Cook was an Excel guru, though). This is all conjecture on my part (I hear his daily-driver is an iPad pro). I would love to hear him talk about this if I'm wrong.
I definitely think it should be accessible, but don't see the benefit of making what would have to be an abstract curriculum to high school students required. I'd like to see classes offered in HS, basic computer literacy mandatory, and specific, more professionally focused classes offered on the web and at community colleges (Excel, SQL, etc).
I don't know if Tim Cook can code. Despite Steve Jobs' fantastic ability to do talk to a technical crowd about WebObjects [0], Woz claims Jobs never wrote a single line of code in his life.
But Tim Cook is Tim Cook, and Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs. For all lesser people, coding is both a powerful skill and more importantly, a profound way to think, never mind a medium for better understanding the computers that are inextricable from modern life.
Yes, the "Should you learn to code" debate is a frequent one on HN. I've found that when I disagree with people here, it's because we differ about what programming can do. I don't see programming as a means to be a web dev, or dev ops, or data scientist. I see it as something more basic but more universal: the ability to make machines do exactly what we want.
I teach journalism at the university level. And I force all journalism students to learn SQL, even as most of them have never done any type of scripting. My initial motive was because SQL was simply the most direct way to deal with bigger-than-Excel datasets and to do JOIN operations. I've come to appreciate that SQL is the most concise way to describe what we exactly what we want to do with data -- e.g. the simplicity and explicitness of SORT and GROUP BY, compared to memorizing the Excel menu actions for sorting and aggregation.
Because I learned SQL on the job long after I studied computer science, I never really saw it as a proper programming language. To this day I don't even know to define variables and functions in SQL. But now, I see that it still embodies important programming fundamentals, including how the interpreter is literal and unforgiving, how we have to know and state exactly what we want because the interpreter doesn't assume, and how important is to know exactly what you want and what you expect -- determinism and reproducibility are inherent attributes of programming.
To give an idea of how far removed today's college students are from what computing is at its core: on the first day of SQL, I explain how SQL is a language, and instead of button clicking, we write out what we want into the client using SQL syntax. Inevitably, a student will interrupt and ask how somehing about why the client isn't running my code. Or, how do we know when we've made an error.
After a few years of this, I understand their confusion: they see me type a SELECT statement into the client, and yet nothing happens. Well, of course nothing happens because I haven't told the client (or REPL) to execute it. But these students are so confused because they simply do not use software that waits for the user to execute (or, not so long ago, clicking the OK button). Think about it. Typing anything into Google Chrome's address bar causes an auto completion to execute. Same with Facebook. With things like Snapchat/Tindet/Instagram, you don't do anything that remotely feels like executing a typed-in command (most users probably think a Google search query is basically an executed command).
So IMO, learning programming is useful -- not necessarily to become a developer -- because you can be aware of the principles of computation without having to take a course that covers logic gates/NAND/ALUs/Assembly, etc. I teach Python for elective classes. But if journalism students don't take any other programming classes, at least they can put SQL on their resume.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goNXogpwvAk