That’s a good point. It also shows that those who are worried about everyone learning to code, and our job market subsequently becoming saturated, is rather a needless worry.

Sure some saturation will occur, but furthering your point, just because most can read and write doesn’t mean they’ll all become professional writers.

what worries me is the code-monkey idea behind everyone can/need to code. I don't want coding to become the blue-collar skill of the next decade.

I hope you didn't mean this as elitist as it comes across. There's nothing wrong with blue-collar coding

I meant it in a way that if coding becomes a blue-collar job salaries will go lower, people who have ambition will move into another field, work life will get harder.

Yes there is. As a craft, it dies.

It is already a blue-collar skill for 3/4 of people who code.

I think the author is pointing at the crop of "learn programming" classes offered for elementary kids under the guise of STEM. And I have seen parents spending sleepless nights because their kid cannot and the neigbor kid can program in Python in Grade 4. Which I believe, is utterly pointless, and does not define how good/bad your kid will be at programming in adult-life. I think some this myth stems of the stories of great programmers whose parents got them an Atari at the age of 4 and so on. I think they are a rare exception, than the norm.

I can relate to this article -- my daughter went through programming courses in school (Bay Area public schools are full of these crazy STEM courses), but she did not understand a thing of constructing software. All they learnt was a bunch of syntax, and a bunch of solved problems. I think they will do much better if the STEM courses focus less on a "programming language" and more on "problem solving and thinking software" (I just made this up now). :-)

Very true. That being said though, you need to also show and teach them the fun in exploring programming, as the article touches on. The same can be said about math. It is important to take the time and get fluent in basic arithmetic to go further in your studies, but that can't come at the cost of the child hating math because it is so boring, or the child thinking it is only a "repeat what is written as the answer" subject.

Similarly, children learn fluency in arithmetic first before they introspect more deeply into their mathematical activity.