As a developer I like the idea. As a citizen I wonder why a nation should prioritize programming before any other skill set? Why not rhetoric, drawing or dancing? What are the underlying assumptions and goals of teaching programming at such a young age? Is any of this evidence based?
I wonder if the goal is not to create programmers? Much like teaching geometry isn't to prepare students for a career of proving the congruency of pairs of triangles. The mental skills one uses to give unambiguous instruction to an computer may be valuable in communicating unambiguously with humans or decomposing seeming intractable problems.
Then again, you could probably go for a similar goal using mathematics.