Here's my two cents: We should not be encouraging people to learn to program so much as we should be encouraging people to learn how to construct an algorithm.

Here's my two cents: We should not be encouraging people to learn to program so much as we should be encouraging people to learn how to construct an algorithm. That's the first thing you need to learn. Kind of like learning how to properly construct a sentence. You need to understand how to express a problem in a step-wise fashion. There's a lot of talk in the technology industry about diversity. Adding more women, etc, but on a whole we need career diversity. Coders, writers, artists, actors, mathematicians, welders, plumbers, cooks, chemists, managers, politicians, and so on. Society takes more than just coders. So let's just encourage kids to get involved in finding a way to contribute that they might enjoy or at least find interesting.