[bobochan]

The most important anecdote that I can tell from the early 1980s is how optimistic we all were. My dad was an engineer and helped take the lead on fundraising to buy Apple ][+ computers for the school classrooms in our town. He used to earnestly tell everyone that he met that my generation would be the last one to go through a curriculum where programming was not a core skill. He imagined a world where everyone would understand how to code.

He passed away before the realization set in that "computer skills" were going to be defined as word processing and spreadsheets rather than programming, and I think he would be very disappointed in our current trajectory.

[Jtsummers]

That optimism still largely existed in the 90s, too, when grade school math textbooks had BASIC listings in them. Pretty sure that all disappeared by the time I graduated at the end of that decade, except in districts that couldn't afford new textbooks.

[mbrodersen]

I don’t think it will ever happen unfortunately. Programming requires the ability to think abstractly. Something that most people are not very good at. It’s the same reason why most people will never become good at math. IQ tests basically tests your ability to think abstractly. And the more a job requires abstract thinking, the higher the average IQ is for people working those jobs. No amount of money or intensive focused training will change that.