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The claim isn't just made with arguably useless disciplines, though. Many people argue (quite rightly, IMO) that programming doesn't just teach you to command machines to do your bidding, but also instils powerful thinking tools. So even if kids don't grow up to be software developers, it's still valuable for them to learn programming. Similar arguments could be made for law or finance.
Slightly off topic, but I both program and play guitar and for the longest time I was wondering why I was getting an overwhelming feeling of the two bleeding into each other. While playing guitar, it would "feel" like I was also coding. Eventually I figured out that the common thread is probably the general task of algorithm optimization.
There's no way for me to tell if programming made me a better guitar player or vice versa.