Obama Pledges $4B to Computer Science in US Schools

This is misunderstanding the future state of the programming professions of the future. This is understandable, since you're merely projecting the current state forward, but things will almost certainly change.

Up until now, the majority of programming jobs have been filled by people trained in CS and we've had to learn whatever disciplines which we're asked to apply our programming discipline to. But as we're able to layer more and more abstractions on top of the machines that do our computing, programming will become much more accessible and the situation will change. In the future, the majority of programming will be done by domain experts who learn enough programming discipline to automate their field. There will always be a small, niche of core CS practitioners that advance the state of the art of the tools used at the higher levels. But they will be that will be a very small percentage of the workforce.

The important thing isn't that we create more CS graduates. That will cause the problems you foresee. What we need to do is ensure that all graduates outside of CS are trained in basic computer programming.

To emphasize the second point, I only started programming in college sophomore year due to a requirement in my original major, and would have been too intimidated to take it otherwise thanks to all the other kids that had learned before college (a situation unique to CS). Yet now as a developer I earn more than me or my parents could ever have dreamed, just because my college happened to require I take the course.

I know others who were too intimidated and weren't forced into it. What if they'd tried it out in high school? Maybe they too would have a shot at what is arguably among the best careers in the US (good pay / reasonably low stress / low cost of entry).

While it might not be "real" programming I would suggest that basic exposure to programming in school would make the following activities (not limited to them obviously) more accessible to the population and it would be a Good Thing (tm)

* Figuring out why their computer/gadget isn't working

* Writing small scripts and/or using scripty features like functions in Excel

* Be a more informed customer of technology products

* Find software to address solved problems (just knowing to look is half the battle here)

* Better understand URLs (improve computer security, know that it's a stupid listicle and don't bother clicking, etc)

I'm sure there's more good things and would love to hear others. I tried to keep them on the same order as being able to read the fine print or balance a checkbook style benefits since we've decided that education shouldn't imply to children that they could grow up to be authors or mathematicians (kidding!).

It's not an easy subject at all but even just understanding the basics are hugely helpful in terms of un-abstracting the machines we use every day. I think it's hard to overestimate how much easier life is when you can address more of your own problems.

Let's say there's a program that takes a list of things and prints envelopes or something. If you or I submit the list and it keeps dying on me, but another list worked fine, I'll probably check the list that doesn't work. Hm. Oh look, there's an umlaut in this guy's name, maybe it doesn't accept unicode [s/ü/u, try again].... awesome, it works.

You only need to have been exposed to loops and character encoding and bad input to have that be your response instead of "GAH! THE MEAN PROGRAM HATES ME!".

It's a contrived and simplistic example but just watching my family around technology is kind of fascinating and sad because there is definitely a kind of mental tax or anxiety about what they perceive to be the pernicious beyond-control nature of their devices. Maybe that's actually the best reason to expose kids to programming: in order to avoid a sense of helplessness and that these machines are controlled by magic wielded by others. Given the overwhelming influence that programs are playing in people's lives it almost seems unfair not to expose people to the basic mechanics of how they work.