Reading and writing is intellectually challenging. Everyone can do it now, because we make sure to teach them to do it, and because it's necessary to live in modern society.
Are you seriously trying to claim that programming, of any useful sort, is so hard that only really smart people, presumably like yourself, can do it? Christ. I really hope the software development industry gets its ego kicked in really hard in the near future so everything can stop sucking because of elitist asshats.
Well on one hand, it could be my massive ego, and on the other it could be the truth.
You're the one arguing on the basis of value. I don't. Let me just ask you this; do you think that being a good enough finance trader requires a high IQ? I'm pretty sure of it, and I'm also of the opinion that what they're applying their smarts to is a net negative for society as a whole.
Another question, have you read Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate?
I think the other two comments make good points. There is every chance that everyone will learn to use a small set of fundamentally composable digital tools in the future. That's programming.
I think "intellectually challenging" just means poorly explained or resulting from poor access. Anyone can program, it's just artificially hard to do it today.
> There is every chance that everyone will learn to use a small set of fundamentally composable digital tools in the future. That's programming
That's not, unless you stretch the meaning of the word far into meaningless. But if you insist on doing so, then yes, most people should be able to "compose digital tools" for a small enough number of digital tools and a wide enough meaning of "compose." Although, on second thought, it appears so many people had issues with "programming a VCR" back in the day, and that wasn't anywhere close to my meaning of "programming."
So let me rephrase it, "there is no chance everyone or even majority could become a minimally proficient user of a minimally useful programming language for novel tasks beyond a sequential list of actions."
Is being able to read at the minimum level comparable to programming?
Do you seriously expect 99% of the population to be able to understand something as simple as the demonstration of Euclid's theorem? And yet any programming is more complicated than that, and more analogous.