I disagree. I think with the right levels of exposure at the early stages of education “coding” can become a proficiency just as common as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Of course, just like those skills, people will pursue programming to varying depths, some will determine to study advanced topics while others will remain “coders at the 6th grade level”.
Not everyone will go into CS and develop new data structures, algorithms, or programming paradigms—but most people can and should be able to code solutions to well understood problems—just like mathematics this doesn’t mean everyone will know how to apply it in novel business situations, but just as most people can perform easy calculations they should be able to write straightforward programs.
It’s all a matter of the appropriate cultural and educational scaffolding. Programming is still in its infancy and hasn’t permeated through the education system deeply enough yet to enshrine it as a core proficiency, but we can and should head in this directon.
In America anyways, coding "could" become a proficiency in the same way that business analysis "could" theoretically become a proficiency, but that is so thoroughly at odds with the American education system that I don't think it would happen unless there was a fundamental structural reformation of the entire system from the top down -- culturally, legally and probably generationally.
As someone else in the thread said "
Anyone can learn to cook. This shouldn't be equated to everyone being equipped to become a chef de cuisine." The fact that anyone can learn to cook only magnifies the detectable skill differential between a professional and an amateur, and I see no reason to see anything but the same pattern emerge with software construction.
"I disagree. I think with the right levels of exposure at the early stages of education..."
Right, but that doesn't help today's adults trying to switch careers, as they're past that stage.
"just as most people can perform easy calculations"
That's true by definition, i.e. you would only count a calculation as 'easy' if most people can perform it.
But, based on the results of surveys like the 2015 FINRA financial capability survey, I guess that if you're talking about calculations that >50% of US adults can perform, you're excluding things that most readers of this site would consider 'easy', e.g.:
"What happens if you start with 950, and it grows by 20% each year for 2 years?"
You do realize that every time you enter a line of code in an editor, you are developing new data structures and algorithms, right?
Edit: No, really, I'm serious! There is literally nothing different between gluing APIs together, or whatever you think you are doing, and building the snazziest large-scale distributed statistical model of whatevers. Literally.
Not everyone will go into CS and develop new data structures, algorithms, or programming paradigms—but most people can and should be able to code solutions to well understood problems—just like mathematics this doesn’t mean everyone will know how to apply it in novel business situations, but just as most people can perform easy calculations they should be able to write straightforward programs.
It’s all a matter of the appropriate cultural and educational scaffolding. Programming is still in its infancy and hasn’t permeated through the education system deeply enough yet to enshrine it as a core proficiency, but we can and should head in this directon.