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I don't program anymore -- I haven't in 17 years (since I started law school). What programming at a BASIC level provided me, however, has proved invaluable to me as a lawyer. Understanding logic -- that you can solve large and complex problems through IFs, ORs, ANDs and GOTOs -- is invaluable regardless of one's career path. Even more valuable is the understanding that a machine (which most of us must use as part of our jobs) does not have a mind of its own -- it does what it is told to do. When a program that you write does not work as intended, it is not the machine's fault -- the program writer did something wrong -- the logic of the writer went astray somewhere. Nothing imposes the same level of intellectual accountability that programing does. My dad (who worked with those FORTRAN punch cards) forced all of us kids to write programs in BASIC to solve all types of math and accounting problems as junior high kids (this was in the late 70s -- we had an old WANG computer and then an Osborne PC). None of us kids developed into scientists, engineers, or computer programmers (we are doctors, teachers and lawyers), but we do all understand how computers and logic work, which makes us far more effective in our chosen lines of work. My kids, despite their ability to use the internet, email, and computer games, have no such understanding.
