I believe you also overestimate the willingness of the general population to get involved with programming of any kind.
I don't believe I made a statement about that. I'm not trying to predict whether general computer science skills will become more common outside of formal software engineering in the future -- that's not something I'm equipped to answer. I'm saying that the potential value added by being an accountant who can code or an HR specialist who can code has increased over the last decade or so and will probably continue to do so.
I don't know if I'm willing to agree with that. The main reason is complexity which is growing. We're basically talking about people who are amateur coders, programming isn't their main skill but they can do it. As the complexity of the environment increases, I'm not convinced their limited by definition skills can keep up.
There are at least two directions to this argument. One is that not many non-professional programmers are good programmers. The typical way this plays out is as follows: some guy learns a bit of Excel VBA and starts by writing a few simp...
P/S/A: There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.