I'd guess mandatory programming languages won't have much impact on the amount of people who go into programming as a profession.
I'm torn on the utility of it; unless you're actively working in it the information degrades very quickly. And unlike spoken languages, if you try to come back to it later very little of what you learned before is still valid.
Classes on general computing - and not "coding" - would seem far more useful than teaching kids Python 2.x for a few years. But at the same time those would be far less accessible.
I guess the Fortran programmers from 1960 might be at least somewhat familiar with Fortran 2008, but I suspect the gulf would be wider than a spoken language change. If I watch an episode of the honeymooners, the parts I don't understand are cultural, not linguistic.
I'm torn on the utility of it; unless you're actively working in it the information degrades very quickly. And unlike spoken languages, if you try to come back to it later very little of what you learned before is still valid.
Classes on general computing - and not "coding" - would seem far more useful than teaching kids Python 2.x for a few years. But at the same time those would be far less accessible.