Is programming now ubiquitous and redundant?

This afternoon, I came across this comment on a popular internet forum,

This is getting boring, honestly many people are now programmers or have some relevant IT skills and very soon this skill will be like pure water .

Much like how MS WORD , MS Excel were all hot cake between 2000-2009.
Although not anymore now it's become a redundant skill to have

Here’s my humble response to the comment.
Yes knowledge of Microsoft office is now ubiquitous. But, NO, knowledge of Office tools hasn’t become redundant.

Rather, it has become requisite knowledge that you’re expected to have for even entry level jobs.

Same way programming is turning into requisite knowledge for many social science and engineering fields.

Today, the world has more data than traditional methods and tools like Microsoft Excel, SPSS etc can comfortably handle. This is what they call BIG DATA.

Big Data can be described with it’s five Vs; Volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value.

Big Data takes up large storage, say terabytes or even petabytes of data.

It has great velocity. Say, it keeps updating every few hours. For example, the movement pattern of every player on the pitch for every match in a football season.

Big Data comes from different sources in diverse formats.

Veracity means Big Data is unprocessed and not interpolated. Unlike traditional surveys where you analyze only a sample of the whole population, in Big Data you have access to the whole population.

Lastly, Big Data has the potential to add unspeakable value to human lives. Your creativity and dexterity is your only limit.

So, tell me, how can you analyze two million rows of data with SPSS on your 16gig RAM pc?

Now imagine if the values of those two million rows keep changing every hour. How can your typical analytical tool handle that?

That's where programming comes in. As a statistician with programming skills, you can help your company automate the boring, redundant or even humanly-impossible tasks therefore helping them make guided decisions.

Programming is the future of any decision support system.