Yeah, no. Those things are not the same thing. Try again.

Mandatory in what sense? Most people get by without having to code anything more complex than an Excel formula.

Thanks for providing my reflexive comeback...Programming, to me, is as expressive and essential as reading and writing, and those who think all the coding problems/jobs are going to end when everyone learns programming...I just don't understand what they perceive to be the scope of programming.

I think people are too hung up on how programming seems to be newly ushered in by technology, despite its theoretical origins more than a century ago (very conservatively speaking). Well, writing and reading existed long before Gutenberg...but before he made mass media possible, it would have been very reasonable to argue that writing and reading were not essential to being productive members of society.

Right, but there is a difference between everyone needing to learn to read and write in order to communicate by written word, sign documents etc. and everyone needing to learn to write sufficiently good to write a novel. As I see it, it's the same with computers and coding. Everyone should be able to operate a computer (or smartphone, tablet, whatever) and do tasks efficiently on it, but not everyone should be required to learn the intricacies of their computer in order to program it. Some people aren't interested in that, and that's completely fine, just as some people aren't interested in learning to write a novel.

I personally don't agree with the sentiment that 'coding is the new literacy'. Yes, it's the digital age and all that, and coding can help you solve some specific problems, but for 99% of the problems that 99% non-programmers encounter, someone has already written a piece of software that will solve it way better than they could have done themselves. When people learned how to read and write, they were suddenly able to communicate by letters, take notes, read books, etc., and a whole new world opened for them. As for computers, well, that new world opened when people learned how to operate a computer and use it for various tasks, not when they learned to code. I see a much narrower use out of coding literacy for the average person who doesn't care much about programming or computers in general.

Not at all. Nor was it implied in the question.