That's because I don't buy the premise of the burdened constraints. Especially not when it comes to programming. You are trying to build up a false contradicti

That's because I don't buy the premise of the burdened constraints. Especially not when it comes to programming. You are trying to build up a false contradiction. Different choices brings people forward in different ways but it can never be a bad thing to learn something even if you don't end up becoming a professional. The cost you are talking about is simply not there with programming. Your ability to access almost any field greatly increases with the ability to program, especially in a world where the collective information accumulated to almost double every second year. You can use programming to explore all those other fields. Whether music, personal finance and so on. Saying that it's unrealistic that programming is at the interection of many subjects makes absolutely no sense. Programming embeds statistics not the other way around. It's the one thing that can be used to simulate almost all other phenomena expect the experience itself. And so the cost would be NOT to understand at least the fundamentals of programming. If you disagree with this then that's your right, but to claim that someone shouldn't be learning programming is just as absurd as claiming no one should learn music or football just because there is a cost. That "cost" is perspective and perspective is always valuable.