I thought about that; the issue is not that one must have a college course to get started on programming, or that a course in secondary or primary school is the

I thought about that; the issue is not that one must have a college course to get started on programming, or that a course in secondary or primary school is the only pre-college exposure people could have. It's that of all students in college, a very small percentage of them have any exposure to programming. And I think we can safely assume that the percentage would be an order of magnitude lower among students that never make it to college (which still describes a majority of people---attending college for even a day puts you in a minority). By contrast, even the most NCLB-starved schools tend to have some art and music programs, even if they're cut way back, and virtually everyone has some (perhaps inadequate) PE classes and access to pickup games of basketball or stickball or whatever. There's really no imminent chance of the number of people who have done "some" programming coming within two orders of magnitude of the number of people who have done "some" art or played "some" sports.