Everybody does not need to learn to code.

Well atleast the guy training others in the opening picture needs to :-). He is mixing cases in javascript (defined TXT and doing txt.toLowerCase()). Perhaps an HTML dude who is doing javascript.

I used to work for the company that started this initiative. It's all just marketing fluff. A friend of mine who was there during the entirety of this initiative said that out of the 30 ish people who were forced to do this only 1 took it seriously. He also felt it was a severe waste of the engineers time.

There's also the use of document.writeln.

I'm no JS expert, but... I thought that was a big NO-NO.

This is one of the better essays arguing against "learn to code" because it actually acknowledges that there are real benefits to learning coding that don't relate to working in an IT job, just as there are real benefits to learning to write that don't relate to being a published author.

But I disagree with the notion that, as the OP states, that learning to code is futile because "most who “learn to code” will end up learning anything that sticks."

One of the most common niche phone apps I've seen used day-to-day, among my peers, are apps used to calculate tips from a bill. Even though the math needed to do so is trivial: it's literally a concept mastered by fourth or fifth grade. Yet these tip-calculating apps are popular. Obviously, math is not something that "sticks" in a practical way with most non-STEM people...yet, why do we bother spending roughly one-third of the K-12 curriculum teaching and testing it?

Well, from my layperson's viewpoint, I'd argue that while many people lose the ability to do math, they at least understand that it exists. They may not be able to multiply 0.15 or even 0.20 against a whole-dollar amount in under 30 seconds, but they at least get the concept of percentage of a whole, and, if there are multiple diners, the concept of division and order of operations (you want to divide the bill after adding the tip).

Would they understand this without any education in math? I'm just a layperson but I'm guessing that such a concept could be totally foreign to someone who has never learned division. At the very least, if such a person were given a malicious app that incorrectly calculated the tip (on the order of 2 to 3x, in favor of the server), that person would have no idea that they were being fleeced.

So I think that it's too early to give up on coding just yet...there's a middle ground between baking out a skeleton Rails app and having done enough code to understand logic and computational thinking for the rest of your life.

Every student should have, at least, exposure to coding and the opportunity to learn it. This has not been the case in my lifetime.

In middle school, a special instructor was brought in to teach programming to the GATE kids. She decided she could only handle one student. So out of the entire class, only one kid was exposed to programming in school

When it was time to enter high school, there were two public schools in the area. One had an AP Computer Science class, but the student body was notorious for its high rates of drug abuse. My parents stuck me in the other, which offered no programming classes at all.

In college, I applied to be a CS major, but I was required to choose a second major since CS was impacted. The school admitted me into my second choice of major. Despite pleading my case with the CS department and arguing with the provost after I enrolled, I was unable to switch into the CS major or take CS classes.

I don't mean to whine. I'm sure I had it a lot better than many self-taught programmers. And maybe if I fought harder, I would have gotten in. But the education system did me no favors in learning CS.

And when I see politicians and Silicon Valley billionaire executives lamenting the lack of skilled programmers in the U.S. while doing nothing effective to fix the problem, I have to roll my eyes.