Thanks for providing my reflexive comeback...Programming, to me, is as expressive and essential as reading and writing, and those who think all the coding problems/jobs are going to end when everyone learns programming...I just don't understand what they perceive to be the scope of programming.

I think people are too hung up on how programming seems to be newly ushered in by technology, despite its theoretical origins more than a century ago (very conservatively speaking). Well, writing and reading existed long before Gutenberg...but before he made mass media possible, it would have been very reasonable to argue that writing and reading were not essential to being productive members of society.