100% population literacy is neither reasonable nor attainable. Yet, functional literacy has drastically improved throughout the past century.
To say programming is never to attain such a characteristic is making a statement against the trends of history in all other academic disciplines. Focusing on the present state is an ignorance of underlying trend.
A couple thousand years ago, groundbreaking advances in trigonometry were made by some of the worlds smartest people. Today the average high schooler knows soh cah toa.