Judging from the responses so far, it seems the thread is going to evolve into a similar fashion to these previous threads discussing the same topic (not to say it isn't worth discussing again - but it has come up quite often recently).

Most on HN seem to support the idea that not everyone should become a computer programmer (as a profession), but being exposed to the ideas in used in CS are very helpful for learning how to think about certain types of problems.

Personally, from a practical standpoint, I think a lot of people could benefit by learning basic scripting to automate computing tasks - I've seen way too many people doing extremely tedious tasks by hand, when a simple script could have saved them hours.

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