I find it exciting that there are others who have also realized that programming skills are going to be as necessary to success today as reading and writing have been for the past few centuries.

I had the same epiphany last year and wrote about it along with what I thought it would lead to:

http://www.yacoset.com/Home/the-future-of-it

Yes, I'm boasting that "I thought of it first", but I have a feeling that maybe I haven't.

Because new necessary skills come along all the time. If you can't drive a car today, for example, you're severely disadvantaged. Or the ability to type more than 20 wpm, or coordinate your thumbs with what a character/cursor does on a screen, or comprehend cause-and-effect once you throw computers and the Internet into the mix.

In another couple of decades there'll be a new skill that everyone has to learn, or else resign to flipping burgers. I, for one, am looking forward to it.

Not the burger flipping part, tho.