OK. You're probably right. But AP CS was not difficult for anyone. If you did the work, you got an A+. And then the exam was worthless as an indicator of how good you are. Even my friend who tried to copy and paste off Yahoo Answers got a 5 (the highest you can get). You can look at the course description[0]—it's easier than Programming 101 (of course not even close to the MIT version). It's all in java and you don't have to know what a pointer is.
> The languages are getting easier and more powerful.
Definitely agree with you on that one. I am learning swift right now and it has come really far from objective-C.
> I think the world will soon just have 2 groups of people - people who program or make things, and people who don't.
Now that is an interesting perspective.
> If I am to choose an easily, portable skill to harness, programming is better than box-packing or coffee-pouring.
That's a really unfair comparison. Those are jobs you get for minimum wage. You can't major in box-packing in college, but you can major in software engineering.
As I said before, maybe you're right. My fear is that really, my skills are not unique or specialized. They are just “Oh, I know some C, and some Objective-C, and some Python, and some JavaScript, and some Java, and some shell scripting, and barely any C++”. I feel like nothing stands out from that. With the exception of Objective-C (I'm including the native frameworks here), those are all languages that every programmer should know (C) or would be able to pick up fairly quickly (Java).
[0]: http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/ap-c...