This is attacking a strawman, as someone who will enthusiastically promote coding in schools and who try to teach my kids coding, my idea has never been that everybody needs to become a software developer.<p>To me learning coding is like learning math or history. It is an essential skill for modern society even if our primary job is not necessarily centered on those skills.<p>I believe done right, programming is a good way for many to understand many concepts in mathematics better. Many fields would benefit from just minuscule amounts of automation, yet they are not doing it because those working in the field have no understanding of the possibilities of automation. Having basic understanding of programming would let you understand better when and where tasks can be automated, even if you aren not necessarily the person doing the automation.<p>Almost everybody today use some form of software for their job. This software could offer better forms of automation of repetitive tasks if there was a basic general knowledge of the principles of programming.<p>Understanding how a task can be divided into multiple steps, which can be repeated by loops or conditionally performed by if statements does not require deeper understandings of singleton patterns, factory objects, strategy patterns, open closed principles, linked lists, binary search trees etc. Useful things can be done with simple programs.