Would you lose respect for a professional nurse's nursing opinions if he said learning to nurse is a really dumb thing to do unless you intend to make a career out of it?
Is it weird to have an interest in nursing and learn about it but not be interested in monetizing it? Sure, it could be. Is it dumb? No.
I wouldn't lose respect, but it is a narrow view, and one worthy of debate.
"Programming" is such a powerful tool for everyone to interact with technology and we could do a better job exposing programatic abstractions. Think of how many people use spreadsheets with complex expressions. Is that that not also programming?
Same thing for coding. It is unreasonable to ask everyone to write a compiler or anything on that scale, but I don't think that fizzbuzz is too much to ask. Computers are part of our everyday life now, and teaching the basics of coding early-on can help demystify them. I also think that like maths, it promotes a rigorous and logical way of thinking that can be useful in other fields.
I see this sentiment a lot on HN. The fatal opinion minefield.
"developers read articles as if they themselves were a compiler, immediately stopping as soon as they reach a sentence they disagree with and then throwing a syntax error"
I think the same thing applies here
There are a number of writers who I disagree with on an ideological level but whose writings and podcasts I'll read/listen to because of the insight these people can provide - even if often I don't agree with their conclusions. I think it's important to be able to consume opinions that don't match your own and be able to hold them in your head without throwing a fit.
Another quote I saw today: "90% of the internet is just people imagining a guy, tricking themselves into thinking he exists, and then getting really mad at him."