Why program?

code.org—What most schools don't teach

As the video above suggests, learning to program is becoming increasingly important in a variety of fields. In truth, as physical and mental operations become automated, virtually every field of human endeavor will be reliant on software and the people who create it.

Throughout history, the economy (and those activities which it drives—such as politics, social mobility, and innovation) has been rooted in resources. In the Agricultural Age, these resources were typically those that could be produced by farming, ranching, mining, fishing, etc. This was succeeded by the Industrial Age, in which resources such as coal, oil, steel, and mass labor were key. Many refer to the current time as the Information Age, where information, represented digitally, is the major driving force of the economy. In this Age, those companies who are able to collect, manipulate, and analyze information (data) are typically based on the work of (and many times, even founded by) computer programmers/software engineers:

Beyond this, some have speculated that we are on the cusp of a new economic model, the Imagination Age. Whereas programming is integral to function in the Information Age, in the Imagination Age, where creativity is the primary resource, the ability to code will be foundational.