[asdff]

Because being able to use a computer to general purpose compute is helpful all over life. It's not a separate skill, its a tool. If you like math and sports you can use code to quickly run analytics on arbitrary data. Maybe you win the march madness bracket among your friends this year as a result or you start tracking interesting info on your personal skills. Maybe you can use some custom software to help you speed through a homework assignment in school, or you can opt to make some software and sell it on the side instead of flipping burgers for part time work while in school. Maybe you like cooking, now with programming you can write a scraper to collect recipes from these js heavy websites and store them into a local database not prone to bit rot. All people should be budgeting, and knowing how to code means you can easily roll your own budgeting software without having to deal with fees or the lack of features tailored to your own purposes from big commercial software. If you decide to run a small business, now you can handle your own web development, you can rope in services to run a storefront or track business analytics. maybe you are into gardening, now you can program a raspberry pi to water your plants for you whenever the soil starts to dry out or the weather calls for a lack of rain or some hot weather in the future.

programming is a tool that you can apply to just about every facet of life and output any number of posibilities. Not having learned it earlier is my biggest regret. imo knowing how to program and really understand how a computer works should be seen as the reading and writing of our modern age. computer literacy is low in this world and that's dangerous, but i think the reason for this is people just don't often get exposed to programming unless they want to seek it out themselves. it's rare to have parents who know how to code or even schools that offer classes in coding, much less require it like english.