Maybe I’m cynical but I just don’t think the average person cares enough to want to program even if it’s really easy. I mean it’s easy to criticise the software for being locked down, and fair enough, but maybe .0001% of users would really want to modify things anyway.
The amount of half-baked Javascript bookmarklets, Excel scripts, and SQL stored procedures I have come across in my lifetime beg to differ.
People are already programming, and they'd do more of it if everyone had basic knowledge of how. It's like literacy. Before general literacy, people thought it was pointless to learn to write, now everyone jots down grocery lists and working notes because they're capable of doing it without a second thought.
People need to understand how computers work because they put a lot of trust and faith in their computers. At any time, the computer might be sending your financial details to a criminal, or taking pictures of you and sending that to a criminal. This sort of overwhelming trust is easily abused.
Learning to program is a good step to understanding how computers work. Making software "inspectable" or "modifiable" by ordinary people allows them to learn more about what's going on, and become accountable for it.
I might be wrong, and there are indeed lots of things in people's lives that they don't understand, but it's still a good thing to take into account. Computers in a sense "do more" than most other machines, and our connection with them is more intimate, so it's perhaps more important for us to understand how our computers work than, for instance, how our cars works.
