In relation to "coding becoming the next literacy" and having demographics on people who know how to code... What use does a mere "learning to code" actually h

In relation to "coding becoming the next literacy" and having demographics on people who know how to code... What use does a mere "learning to code" actually have to most people? How do we measure fluency in "coding"? Think about it. A crash course on basic procedural constructs like loops, variables, functions and maybe some simple exercises where one makes use of a language's standard library is not particularly useful. Even the conceptual knowledge that one gains is relatively minimal. It's not like the huge percentages of people "knowing how to code" will do anything meaningful with it. Why? Because they wouldn't have the skill. Many discussions revolving around compulsory code education seem to completely ignore the tons of domain-specific knowledge one requires to put coding skills to any real use. It's likely that little of the "code literates" will ever contribute to an open source project, for instance. This is because besides code, you have (potentially): a build system, continuous integration, documentation generator, actual protocols that must be understood (HTTP, DNS, FTP, etc.), use of OS-specific system calls and constructs, general knowledge of memory layout, knowledge of system administration, etc. These are merely condensed into a nutshell. Code by itself is of little use without actually knowing how computers work in general, which is no small task to comprehend, and requires tons of domain-specific knowledge as to the many abstractions we have created around software and hardware. It's a perpetual learning experience. A person who has learned rudimentary C is of little use in any serious project that requires knowledge of the POSIX and/or glibc API, for instance. It's a completely meaningless metric in general. Most people will just do some basic imperative coding in a highly abstracted knowledge with no real conceptual understanding of what actually goes on, and promptly forget about it. Maybe they'll remember how to write a recursive Fibonacci sequence procedure. Software is more than code. It is complex and multi-faceted. I can see blind coding having some uses for things like VBA macros, but those can be picked up by individuals on a case-by-case basis, when and if they need them.