I imagine most of us programming now will be dead by the time (if at all) programming reaches some kind of universal acceptance; think of how long it took for literacy to become universally important, even though reading and writing was done centuries before Gutenberg.
20 years ago, learning programming wasn't as important because the technology just wasn't there to make it a good return on investment. But the value of reading and writing was also relatively minimal when it cost a fortune just to make a single copy of a book. If programming is how we turn human thought into machine-understandable commands and subroutines, and more and more of our work is delegated to machines...it's hard to imagine the long-term argument against learning programming.
20 years ago, learning programming wasn't as important because the technology just wasn't there to make it a good return on investment. But the value of reading and writing was also relatively minimal when it cost a fortune just to make a single copy of a book. If programming is how we turn human thought into machine-understandable commands and subroutines, and more and more of our work is delegated to machines...it's hard to imagine the long-term argument against learning programming.