> Taking a step back, I personally question why being able to code should be considered important?
Ability to code gives you a particular mindset that makes it much easier for you to work with computer technologies. It's helpful, but on the other hand you could argue that all other technologies we use in daily life have been sufficiently abstracted away that you can get away with not knowing how they work.
The real reason why coding is a big topic in society is that, for the past two or three decades, programming has been an easy way to move up one or two socioeconomical classes. Most well-paying fields are nowhere as easy in terms of workload or required education. Of course, if everyone became a programmer, the payoff wouldn't be as high anymore, but there's lots of money to be made right now by pointing to college dropouts made tech billionaires, or fat FAANG paychecks, and selling people coding bootcamps.
(Or, in less cynical terms: the demand for software developers still outpaces supply; this manifests as a background social pressure to create more software developers.)
Ability to code gives you a particular mindset that makes it much easier for you to work with computer technologies. It's helpful, but on the other hand you could argue that all other technologies we use in daily life have been sufficiently abstracted away that you can get away with not knowing how they work.
The real reason why coding is a big topic in society is that, for the past two or three decades, programming has been an easy way to move up one or two socioeconomical classes. Most well-paying fields are nowhere as easy in terms of workload or required education. Of course, if everyone became a programmer, the payoff wouldn't be as high anymore, but there's lots of money to be made right now by pointing to college dropouts made tech billionaires, or fat FAANG paychecks, and selling people coding bootcamps.
(Or, in less cynical terms: the demand for software developers still outpaces supply; this manifests as a background social pressure to create more software developers.)