[nanomoose]

Well... if you read up to that point you would also have read "is the key to the future for both children and adults alike" - and you've only addressed the kids bit. I think the silly craze has died down a bit in the UK, but a few years ago we were subjected to such excitement as the news highlighting activities like c level execs doing coding classes in their lunchbreaks - 10 o'clock news?! This may have been about the same time as the BBC microbit was produced - I've heard nothing of that recently either. Easiest way to confirm it was a silly craze is to watch peak daft hysteria disappear into the distance.

[dkarl]

The idea of making some degree of programming universal in the school curriculum both predates and will outlast the craze you're talking about. I don't know about the Trump plan, but Obama proposed spending hundreds of millions of dollars changing the way hundreds of millions of elementary to high school aged kids are taught. If such a program is carried out, the effects and the costs will be felt over decades.

c level execs doing coding classes in their lunchbreaks

This just doesn't sound weird to me at all. CTOs read about marketing and finance; pharma CFOs read about biochemistry. Execs spend an afternoon working in the call center or learning to operate a jackhammer to prove they're regular guys. It's what you get when you mix ambition, personal curiosity, image awareness, and having the authority to make stuff like that happen. In that context it's not as significant as the 10 o'clock news might make it sound.

[watwut]

I did learned about loosely related to my job topics or on the news topics over lunch breaks and evenings. I am programmer, but I did read up on management, accounting, physics, art, biology, finance, children, history etc. I dont think any of that was silly.

For many people, the idea that they could do learn some programming was new and they were curios just as I was about the above. Pretty much any temporary hobby people tend to do is like that - something wakes up curiosity and ambition. Network effect is usually smaller, it is just one company or office doing the thing, but when it is in the news a lot of them gonna do it at the same time.