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The ability to program is the literacy of the millennium. One thousand years ago "Everybody [did] not need to learn to read", yet today, many countries have a near 100% literacy rate.

However, I don't think we need to force today's programming languages upon people. Let's invent the printing press of programming languages, making the cost of learning to program much easier. (IFTTT is working on this.)

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The best example of this are spreadsheets. There are plenty of people who don't think they can program and don't think they have any need to program, but will write some really insane things in Excel. They just don't realize what they are doing is programming, poorly. The great advantage of computers isn't "better TVs", it is that they are "compute-ers", and anybody who has an office job has a real use for one.

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