But, even at this level, most of the people around me - being non-programmers - would run in horror from the idea of even getting into that level of trying to i

But, even at this level, most of the people around me - being non-programmers - would run in horror from the idea of even getting into that level of trying to interact with a computing environment. Even if one does not go on to do significant software development, learning to deal with a computer at the level of programming it teaches a person something about rigorous thought. At first, a lot of effort is often needed to fix a fiddly off-by-one error or a crashing program.