[jrochkind1]

I don't think it's a good analogy.

The typical U.S resident interacts with or otherwise has their life significantly effected by software not only every single day, but likely nearly _every single minute_.

The same is not true of brain surgery -- it's probably not even true of 'medicine' in general.

I absolutely agree with the OP that being an empowered individual in this environment absolutely requires some degree of 'computational literacy', and optimally would involve nearly every person, yes, actually knowing how to write software to some extent, the more the better.

I don't agree this is realistically going to happen though. The Hypercard future is not the road we went down. I do think this has pretty major unfortunate impacts on the degree of alienation and loss of control most people are likely to continue to experience in our highly digital society though.

But I think the best thing we can do right now is focus on some notion of accessible "computational literacy" within the present actually existing environment, not thinking we're going to get everyone to the point of being able to build actually-useful software. But they still can _understand_ software better. A hypercard-like learning environment might be useful for this. But it's unlikely to change the face of software development any time soon.