Ms Wente, I wonder if you have ever "coded" or ever had to patience to listen and understand what it involves. I consider baseball a silly and dreadfully boring activity, but I would never write a piece about it in a newspaper - as I have never played it nor have I really watched much of it.
Learning the fundamentals of coding is beneficial for all kids. It is not just because coding will be necessary in various jobs (putting together a website for one's business, sorting the list of patients and calculating the average wait time for a bed, designing a prototype, finding the optimal time to perform a task...). It is mostly the skills it teaches: logic, algorithmic, analytic and structured thinking. It is very much needed, especially these days when the math curriculum has been drastically dumbed down. 
Our young need to learn how  think correctly, just as they need to learn good spelling and good grammar.