At first, I dislike teaching programming in schools. It is because the space might then be over populated and finding jobs will be harder. Then I realized math was taught in school, science was taught in school. But most of us students didn't end up as mathematicians or scientists. Programming is much like math and science. It is a technical topic, and not all of us will like it. It can be taught in school as an essential subject but not all of them will pursue to be a programmer in the future.
It would make software developers' lives a lot easier if so many people weren't scared out of their wits by computers. I think even basic programming knowledge can really help with that, because it makes it abundantly clear that a computer is, itself, a tool rather than a magic box (that happens to contain some tools in between all the scary and confusing stuff).
It isn't so much that I think everyone should be writing their own databases, but some understanding of how good software _should_ work, (for example, standard data formats), can guide informed decisions about software. Some basic technical knowledge is enough to understand why you should never build a large website on an ancient CMS where you end up with thousands of HTML pages that will need to be completely rewritten, one by one through some clunky web interface, when the site's design changes. Anyone should be able to look at that kind of setup and say "hey, that's complete garbage — let's hire someone who knows what they're doing!" and there will be a few less website janitors in the world. And hopefully a few more people making cool new stuff in their place.
But take any subject we learn in high school, whether it's math, science, history, etc. The general public is vastly uninformed about all of those subjects regardless of the fact that they are taught in high school. Why would programming make a bit of difference in that sense? It's not like programming is not taught at all in high school, anyway.
Yes, absolutely, let's make it harder for kids to compete with us and put us out of work when we are in our 50's. I don't want them innovating and creating new open source libraries that make us more productive or open up new opportunities we can't even imagine today. Life is a zero sum game after all, right? If they win I lose.
