It's strange he made that point about plumbing, then later said you should learn how things work to solve real problems.

He seems to have confused an initiative among some people to learn a new skill in their spare time with a totalitarian injunction that we all become programmers.

To me it's no different to an initiative among people to learn a foreign language. It may be a somewhat qiuxotic spare-time hobby, but the prospect of acceptable failure is partly what part-time hobbies are for, right?

Learning a bit of coding will give one an insight into how hard it is to get right, which will make one appreciate which bits are easy and which bits are hard. What's wrong with that?

The little plumbing I've learned on my own initiative has taught me similar, and I'm less likely to get ripped off as a result.

Exactly! I've encountered the attitude many times: If you learn to DIY your time must not be valuable. This is so wrong, and avoiding dishonest service is an obvious benefit.

Traversing those learning curves is more rewarding the longer you keep at it. Also, it's rare that one field of knowledge doesn't benefit many more.

Exactly - everyone should learn basic plumbing! Not the best analogy he could have used.

He did say that everyone should learn some basic concepts of programming, which I think we could all agree with. Perhaps everyone shouldn't know how to create the next Gmail, but surely there's an advantage to us all knowing how for loops work and how to write a bit of simple code (perhaps just doing math and text basics in Ruby). Many schools already teach this as a standard part of their curriculum using Basic.

I don't think he means that learning plumbing is a bad idea.

I think his point is just that a big hype cluster around learning plumbing would seem silly. There are a lot of useful skills in the world. Programming is one. Plumbing is another. Let's not get crazy and over-emphasize programming.