I agree with most of this essay but not this particular analogy. It’s as shortsighted as saying, “Not everyone should learn to write, just as not everyone should become a published author.”

If we think of the end goal of “learn to write” as becoming an author, then writing is a very limited skill, especially in this technological age in which devices greatly amplify the way humans have communicated for millennia before mass literacy. But because we, as citizens of a modern society, of been forced for a dozen years (at least) to learn and practice writing (and reading, and math), we’ve come to see how mass literacy benefits society, even if 0.1% of people ever become proper authors or even bloggers.

Right now, the status quo asserts that programming is for building apps and websites. But it doesn’t have to be that way, just as learning to write can be much more than ending up with a publishing contract. Programming is its own literacy, the ability to communicate human intent and desire to a thoughtless machine with near-unlimited mechanical power, to produce an infinite array of outputs. How is that not something as useful to the average human as writing and math?