I work in computational linguistics, and it is often aggravating to see linguists doing hours of manual work on data that could be done using a five-liner.

E.g. my wife is a neurolinguist, and she was manually doing mechanical transformation of some EEG data, which was going to take her two days. I wrote a small Python script on the spot in a couple of minutes that did the same work.

That convinced her to learn some Ruby. Afterwards, she has saved a lot of time by writing small data transformation scripts for her research and that of some colleagues.

The problem is that a lot of people don't even know that it is relatively simple to pick up enough scripting skills to make your life easier. So, I think it definitely makes sense to add some coding to high school curricula, so that people at least know, when applicable, that basic scripting is not hard and where to start.