You can easily compare this to literacy, the ability to control written communication. I'm sure around 1800 many people didn't understand the point, since you could always just walk up to almost everyone you'd want to communicate with. There was no way then to forecast all the implications (esp social and technological) that widespread literacy would eventually entail.

Similarly, programming is the ability to control computation. It's very hard for us to understand just how a society would behave when 90% of the population has the power to create any software tool it needs, to compute sophisticated statistics, and so on.

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone today who disagrees it was a good thing that (almost) everyone learns how to read and write. I'm also convinced 100 years from now, you won't find anyone complaining about widespread programming ability.