No, I don't think the push towards greater coding literacy is about people becoming professional programmers. It's easy for programmers to forget something tha

No, I don't think the push towards greater coding literacy is about people becoming professional programmers. It's easy for programmers to forget something that is very special about what we do - we automate our work. Every programmer spends at least some time writing scripts to analyse trace outputs, unit tests to automate testing, preparing macros for their editor of choice etc. As this activity is very similar to our main activity, which is actually writing the code for a real product, we often just consider this to be part of the process. But the thing is that just about every office worker has activities that could be automated. Even if it's just learning how to automate MS Office by using VB scripts, or learning how to shift files around your filesystem based on rules using Automator on a Mac, you can greatly improve the efficiency of workers. Just think of the sort of analysis that knowledge workers could run if they just knew enough to write a webscraper! This is the sort of literacy that the masses need. They need to learn algorithmic thinking, and the basics about how to get to an environment on their computer where they can actually get started. They need to know enough programming vocabulary so that they can Google for more information.