My mother, at her peak, would have never learned how to code even if you held a gun to her head.
There’s lots of things in life I don’t care to learn, but it doesn’t mean I couldn’t. To be perfectly frank, programming is one of the easier things in life I’ve learned, and it’s usually only difficult for the wrong reasons like poor documentation, bugs in other people’s code, people, etc.
I can learn to surf without being a professional surfer. So why can't I learn to code without wanting to make a career out of it?
PS I am the original blog author
It's true, the vast majority of people will never code a "production application".
BUT, many folks code everyday in the form of excel macros, R, Mathematica, Matlab or Julia notebooks. Many people create programs and scripts in all kinds of tools to get stuff done. IT'S ALL STILL PROGRAMMING, it's just not what folks here would consider a traditional "production application". The people who do this are domain practitioners who use computing to do things, but don't have a need to spend a million dollars to hire a team of "real programmers" and their entourage of PMP's, sales, support, and customer success agents to do it for them.
As far as folks "not being able to code" that's all a matter of inclination and background. There's nothing special about software development. Lot's of people can do successfully at various levels. Some are more DIY than others, but I think you would be surprised at what some people's grandma's can do with the right motivation and background.
There's also "nothing special" about writing. Somehow, though, we don't see millions of Hemingways pop up each year.
Writing code is a form of art. There is a science behind it, but the same is true for many other art forms. It's true that everybody can be an artist. Not everybody can be a good artist, though. It's equally true for writers, painters, and coders.
The parent comment was suggesting that very few people can code-- and by "code" they meant "production applications".
I am trying to say that lot's of people can code, well enough to solve their domain problems, well enough to put food on their tables, well enough to not need "real programmers" in increasing numbers of scenarios. Just because they're not doing internet scale application development or cutting edge mission critical projects doesn't mean they "can't code".
There's a long and continuous spectrum between Hemingway-like programmers to bored-out-of-their-skulls enterprise developers to lunch-time dilettantes who are running a far more of their business than they should on brittle excel pivot tables and VBA macros.
What changes once babies grow into toddlers is that they develop the capacity to learn new behaviours, not just through the trial and error of stimulus/response, but through instructions given by language. That's where mothers and fathers excel. The quality of their instructions can be measured by the agility and resilience of the behaviour these instructions impart.
Done well, parenting is not just coding - it's software engineering.
Guess they were wrong when they said people from dying industries should learn some programming: we were coders all along!