I think it's more a fear that programming will eventually leave everyone else without a job. Hence if you can't program in the future, you'll be in as much difficulty as someone who say, can't read/write in an office job - permanently relegated to simple manual labour.

Being a programmer in the modern age is like being a wizard, and it's no surprise that other wizards are concerned that people might learn their magic.

I'd love it if everyone could program, it'd make my life a lot easier and I could do something else interesting.

Also if your job is easy enough to be done by a schoolchild after minimal training, I'm not sure you deserve it.

I agree. It's bound to fail for one thing -- nobody's gonna get blackballed in the programming industry for being too open about programming fundamentals.

Worse yet, controlling information to secure your position is a special kind of evil. Do you respect lawyers who make the world more litigative and themselves more valuable? Do you respect doctors/police officers/etc that protect others in their profession at the expense of the people they hurt? That's the world one builds when they hide that kind of information, one where professions aren't equally accountable.

While I share your wishes that more people would learn to program, this quote rubbed me the wrong way:

"Also if your job is easy enough to be done by a schoolchild after minimal training, I'm not sure you deserve it."

The question is not whether the job can done by a schoolchild with minimal training. The question is: Does your boss think that it can be done by a schoolchild with minimal training?

I don't have a solution. I don't want to see a license for programming or anything ridiculous---(although perhaps a license to manage programmers...), but there is a real problem here.

Programming salaries in the UK aren't really that high, plenty are advertised at sub £20k.

Allowing for inflation, programmer salaries have been flat since 2000. Law, medicine, accounting - all of these absolutely pay more and are more secure jobs.

I think seeing it simply as "learn to code" is too limiting. Programming is a means for humans to implement math and logic with real world effects. Perhaps early efforts will be rote and unenlightening, but I would hope that learning programming is a vehicle towards instilling a greater literacy of logic and numeracy in our society.

If you want to be really cynical, it's GCHQ wanting a bigger talent pool.

But this just puts the power of computing in the hands of the grubby proletariat rather than preserving it for the rich. Surely that's not a Conservative policy move ...

It was Thatchers govt who introduced the original BBC computer literacy project 30 years ago.

Teaching kids to code is very much a Tory thing.

Didn't the initiative for the project come from the BBC rather than from the Conservative led government of the time?

Its because software programming is easy

If you want to put words in my mouth, I can't stop you.

I never said that software programming is easy.