Programming enables automation of your domain-specific knowledge. Animators who could program gave us CG movies. Musicians who could program gave us software music composition tools. Would garbage collectors who could program give us robots to do parts of their jobs? Or apps to communicate real-time problems? Or public education websites? I think it very likely.
Any field -- any field at all! -- that can benefit from information organization and retrieval, automation, scripting, robotics, internal wikis, private smartphone apps, information dissemination, etc., will benefit from people who have deep domain knowledge ALSO being programmers.
> Despite these challenges, we republished the updated graphic without too much delay. But I was left thinking how much easier it could have been had I simply recorded the process the first time as a makefile. I could have simply typed make in the terminal and be done!
In other words, the key "transferrable skill" of programming, is being able to describe a process in enough exacting detail, that nobody ever needs to "reconstruct" it again. The computers-being-able-to-execute-the-process thing is just a nice side-effect.
Any field -- any field at all! -- that can benefit from information organization and retrieval, automation, scripting, robotics, internal wikis, private smartphone apps, information dissemination, etc., will benefit from people who have deep domain knowledge ALSO being programmers.
And I think that's just about all of them.