Yes. Knowing cooking is paramount to feeding yourself and your family cheap, healthy meals.
I might be able to learn a lot of math in school, reading/writing, research (in university), critical thinking (throughout life). But being able to care for my own food, to know, what not to buy (or what to buy) and so on, helped me stay sane and in good shape.
Cooking is of course a good skill to have. So is plumbing, car repair and a lot of other things. But this is entirely besides the point.
The point was this: Is it a necessity for children to be taught [cooking/car repair/plumbing] on the same level as math, reading and writing: From 1st to final grade in school, 10 hours every week? Of course not.
Atwood argues that it is the same with programming. No matter how much we and he love programming, it is not comparable to reading, writing, math, communication and similar.
And in school you're not learning just "reading, writing, math, communication and similar".
Other disciplines learned in school are biology and its branches, like botany or anatomy of the human body, chemistry, physics, history, foreign languages like French and Latin, psychology, philosophy and so on. Not all of these disciplines are taught 10 hours per week.
Also, reading and writing are only taught in the first years. After that they teach you grammar and literary analysis, but considering how illiterate today's teenagers are, many schools are clearly doing a poor job, so to save some taxpayer's money they should just make those optional.
And seriously, I could think of a couple of disciplines I learned in school that would be less important than cooking or programming.
The parts in my comments about cooking, 10 hours pr week, and the short list of subjects, are all merely examples. Replace it with car repair, 2 hours a week and your informative list of school subjects, and the argument is untouched. It should be obvious that these details are entirely irrelevant.
The argument was that a very high proficiency in reading, writing and maths has more value for the average student, than a very high proficiency in a niche subject. A nice subject being FOR EXAMPLE, cooking, car repair or programming.
Sure, our students might benefit from these subjects. But I doubt anyone would seriously suggest giving the same level of educational focus to those areas, rather than to basic life skills such as reading and writing.
And that is Atwood's point: Programming, like car repair, is an esoteric subject, and as such not equal in worth compared to more basic skills such as reading, writing and communication. By all means, subjects such as cooking, car repair and programming is good to know. But for the average student, a high level in reading will be considerably more important than a high proficiency in car repair.
This is the point (and that's actually Atwood's point, I haven't supplied mine), which I was merely explaining to the OP, as the OP interpreted the blog post as being against learning programming at all.
A couple of people countered by argumenting against irrelevant details, such as the use of cooking and car repairs as examples of esoteric subjects. They even started arguing the value of the specific examples compared to the basic skills, which of course is entirely irrelevant to the point I was making.
On a personal note, I was not very good at math in high school and college. I learned Perl for my first job and developed better problem solving skills. I've noticed that the concepts that confused me in my math classes have become more clear.
Apart from at least a fundamental ability to use a stove, it is naturally not that crucial of an ability. The argument of the blog post is that it is the same with programming, i.e. It is not a necessity to succeed in life to know how to code.
I don't think the point of the post is to discourage anybody from learning to code. Rather it is a counterpoint to the recently heavily promoted idea that programming is somehow a necessary life skill.