so what are you going to tell these kids? that they are guaranteed a well paying job if they learn all this shit?

as long as they know it is just for creative expression and they WANT to do it that’s cool. but i am afraid the motives are different.

Don't think "person who has a job doing programming". Think "person who has random menial tasks in their job or life, and wants to automate them".

Not everyone needs to be able to implement an arbitrary program. Everyone ought to be able to write a five-line script to make their life easier and save themselves some time.

Knowing how to use power tools doesn’t mean you’re going to start building barns and start a workshop doing SFX for movies. There’s tons of people who code who don’t consider themselves a programmer because they work in an adjacent field (think of R or matlab).

you could also argue that everybody should know the law. but people don’t. same with personal finance.

I mean, yes. We should teach personal finance & how to learn the law.

Do you think their chances of landing a programming job is enhanced or degraded by learning about programming? You’re arguing for ignorance. Not a great position to take.

You don’t need to know how to program to be succesful in life. In my career as an engineer most of the people I encountered who are wildly succesful are not engineers and cannot program.