> Unless it's part of your job, the odds are vanishingly small that it will ever be of much use to you.
There are very few, if any, areas of knowledge work (which is broader than STEM, but subsumes it) to which a small amount of programming skill cannot be productively applied -- even the ones where institutional IT policies have restricted the available means of applying that skill to, say, Excel macros.
> Nor is it something that's useful in its own right because it promotes clear thinking. Nor is it a steppingstone to other, more broadly useful skills.
I'd have to disagree with this pretty strongly. There are probably ways you could develop some coding skill without learning broadly-applicable problem decomposition and analysis skills that are usable almost everywhere and not usually taught in other contexts, but you'd have to make a special effort.
There are very few, if any, areas of knowledge work (which is broader than STEM, but subsumes it) to which a small amount of programming skill cannot be productively applied -- even the ones where institutional IT policies have restricted the available means of applying that skill to, say, Excel macros.
> Nor is it something that's useful in its own right because it promotes clear thinking. Nor is it a steppingstone to other, more broadly useful skills.
I'd have to disagree with this pretty strongly. There are probably ways you could develop some coding skill without learning broadly-applicable problem decomposition and analysis skills that are usable almost everywhere and not usually taught in other contexts, but you'd have to make a special effort.