I think that the 'everyone should learn programming' idea conflates a few things, most of which are good. - simple automation and tool usage How many billions

I think that the 'everyone should learn programming' idea conflates a few things, most of which are good. - simple automation and tool usage How many billions of hours of productivity are lost because people are manually retyping or reformatting data that could be quickly and easily scripted (with only basic knowledge) or done using commands/tools already present on the system? Quite a lot. How much more effective could people be if they could run even simple queries against the data in their domain? These things aren't difficult, people just don't know that they can do them. - making things more efficient Related to the above, a basic understanding of how to handle data in a way that can be processed, and how to make things organized and open to processing, could go a long way. It doesn't take much programming to realize that text files are much easier to process than Word documents, or that a consistently-formatted spreadsheet is reusable while one with the data scattered around for visual effect is not. - learning to distinguish between things that are easy or difficult to do with programming Lots of good ideas get nixed because someone doesn't want to spend a lot of time and money, or bother the developers, when in reality it's something that could be done in about the time it took to describe it (or less). And we all have plenty of examples of people assuming that something difficult should be quick, easy, and cheap. While it takes a lifetime of experience to be good at estimating such things, and it varies greatly depending on domain and tools used, a little bit of knowledge of how computers work could go a long way in some cases. And for those who say that programming is not for everyone, think of basic math and accounting. Everyone may not be a professional accountant, but everyone has to deal with money. Would you want someone in charge who doesn't even understand that costs need to be lower than revenues to generate a profit? Or that doesn't know how to calculate 5% of $10,000? Some basic knowledge is useful regardless of what you do.