I disagree, and I think there’s enough middle/high schoolers coding on YouTube to largely disprove your claim.
Software isn’t really rocket science (unless you’re making software for rocket science). It gets easier all the time.
Consider the the effort required to learn a foreign language. That level of effort can at least make one able to build websites and iPhone apps which I think is enough to make for nontrivial change in society if people knew it.
The fact that you see middle schoolers coding certainly shows that those specific middle schoolers can code, but that's a far cry from 99.99% of everyone. If only 1% of all the middle schoolers in existence could code, there would still be plenty to see on Youtube, because the Internet is a really big place.
Software might as well be rocket science if you didn’t grow up with regular access to a PC or the internet like 40% of school-age children in the US (many of whom just missed a whole year of school — but they’re low income so the news doesn’t talk about that). It’s really hard to learn to program when the only internet access you have is through expensive prepaid mobile phones.
And even if it’s easy, I do that shit at work all day long; I don’t want to do it when I go home.
That said I’ve always found this to be a weird use case. I’ll be keeping my wireless Magic Wand, thank you.
Software isn’t really rocket science (unless you’re making software for rocket science). It gets easier all the time.
Consider the the effort required to learn a foreign language. That level of effort can at least make one able to build websites and iPhone apps which I think is enough to make for nontrivial change in society if people knew it.