Coding will soon be a basic literacy requirement for any form of knowledge work and many physical jobs as well. —Cliff Moon in The Age of Code.
Coding will never be a basic literacy requirement for most forms of knowledge work, nor for any but a very few physical jobs… Coding is dead. Computer science, software engineering, programming, coding...as you go "down the hierarchy" you find out that there aren't many jobs left below programming. Actually turning a design into code is mostly tedious but exacting grunt work which these days (as in the days of yore) is usually done by the same people who did the design and probably the specification.
Programming is too damn hard: even professionals concentrating on nothing else for decades at a time go really slowly and screw up constantly. Programming is not a skill like typing that almost anyone can master to a usable level in a few months of occasional training. It is one of the most difficult intellectual activities humans practice.
Coding is going out of date at a fairly healthy pace. I predict that the most lines of code ever written in a decade will be written in this decade. The trend is toward shorter, simpler codes underlying domain-specific tools that are coding surrogates, allowing reasonably accurate knowledge manipulation at a reasonable rate by domain experts. Spreadsheets are, as always, the poster child, but CAD tools of the SolidWorks vintage, animation suites, wikis and CMSes are only a few examples of how knowledge workers are doing more, rather than less, coding per unit output than they have for years while still sustaining high and increasing productivity.
Vernor Vinge, a CS professor, writes great CS SF. In the real world, however, programming will be an area pursued by fewer and fewer people with greater and greater expertise and more and more specialization. "Coding literacy" is a pernicious pipe dream. (B)