Programming: it's not just a skill. It's a way of life.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html#...
From pg: "To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect."
And also from Zed Shaw: "Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines."
IT careers; even sysadmins need to write scripts to manage systems.
Any career in the sciences; basically any scientist, even a pure experimentalist, ends up needing to write simulations in MATLAB at the very least.
Any engineering career: computer-modelling complex systems, whether chemical or mechanical or whatnot, requires programming skills.
Anyone in applied mathematics, like operations research.
Anyone in quantitative finance.
I'm pretty sure this covers way more than merely 10 "distinct careers", and there's plenty I missed.
It isn't an either-or proposition, incorporating programming exercises into any science oriented class can not only be illustrative, it like any sort of hands on lab does teach students to think like a scientist and helps to create a more realistic microcosm of how science is actually done these days, with programming forming a bridge between theory and experiment and heavily relied on in analysis.