From personal experience I agree with all those bullet points, and wish to add one more: having the ability to write simple computer programs can be extremely useful in other information-related endeavors. Next time you or one of your friends is burning a lot of time doing a repetetive task on a computer, wouldn't it be nice to be able to turn an hours-long task into the work of 15 minutes with a simple script?

Many organizations heavily rely on computers for their day-to-day business, yet do not understand how to take advantage of them to reduce required human effort.

Kill boring work: become an amateur computer programmer.