I don't know about programming games, or complex applications.

But look how many people work with Excel or similiar - all the kids in Poland learn to use spreadsheets - and this is just purely funcitonal programming language with strange ui.

If they can understand "COUNT.IF" function and referencing cells in expressions - why couldn't they learn to write simple python srcipts.

Programming is easy to learn, hard to master. Most people don't need to learn to write elegant, correctly designed programs that are easy to extend. Most people would benefit from just knowing how to glue together simple scripts to automate what they are doing.

We don't require everybody to learn to write books, but we do want everybody to learn how to write note.