> If you agree that teaching people to code will result in more professional software developers, which seems reasonable to me, we'll have more of them and the cost of any one of them will be reduced.
I'm not sure I can agree with that, though. The barrier to entry is already really damn low -- the kids who are seriously interested in programming are already learning to program anyway, because it only costs them their time. The net effect will probably just be that the average student will become a bit more knowledgeable about how software works, which is pretty undisputably a good thing. If you go into a high school district and make a home economics class mandatory, are half of your graduates going to become chefs? Of course not -- only a few are going to do that, and they were probably going to do it before you even made the class mandatory. The only difference is that now everyone knows how to cook for themselves.
> And again, the skill thing is diminished because we all suck at figuring out who the talented developers are.
On the contrary, I think giving everybody a baseline knowledge of programming could have the opposite effect. If you study English at a liberal arts college and blast through the Codecademy Javascript tutorial over the weekend, you can see why you might think that a career as a programmer would be good for you -- you don't have any technical friends to talk to about what you've learned, and Codecademy says you learned everything there is to know about Javascript, so obviously you must be ready for a web development position, right? You have to know what you don't know, and the problem with unqualified developers is that they don't know what they don't know. If everyone learns how to write functions in high school, then you're acutely aware that there's a whole world of stuff you won't know unless you study independently.
> I'm not saying we should hoard the coding knowledge or whatever -- that cat is already out of the bag.
To be honest, most of the objections to the "everyone should learn to code" suggestion sound like that. It seems like everyone is extremely concerned with protecting the value of their own education, no matter what the cost.
> But if the president is saying nice things about coders, maybe think about what reasons he could have for that besides the goodness of his heart.
What are you suggesting here? The president has an evil plan to destroy your livelihood?