It's really interesting to learn programming so you can understand how a phone, a drone or your laptop applications are working !
I like the idea of teaching programming to kids, to feed their technological curiosity, to encourage them to learn programming and IT in general, because in the next 10 years i guess lot of jobs will disappear (like a bus driver, now autonomous driving car exists !).
But in my humble opinion, ( as an intermediate software engineer :P ), we're living in the Era of Data ! (Big Data), now data are getting bigger and bigger, and the new adventure now is to try to exploit this big mine of available free data ! (like Facebook does) to make it profitable, to use it in the Artificial Intelligence domain, and a lot ...