I don't think I really need to explain much, their admins are transphobic. 
https://hexbear.net/post/1587342
Snowe, an admin, complained about a transgender person being offended over being misgendered. Ategon made an apology post but keeps snowe on, no public apologies from snowe to the transgender people affected.
Textbook 
note: conversation about Ategon's use of the word triggered edited out, might be misunderstanding, need clarified
Being able to read and write was considered a rare skill that commanded a high position in society too. Scarcity doesn't mean that the field is inherently hard.
In theory, getting a CS degree is about mastering computer science. In practice, CS grads spend their time memorizing the syntax for 30 different types of regex and write CRUD apps their entire career. The particularly talented ones will devote their time to creating a 31st variant of regex 30 layers of abstraction away from the actual hardware that uses more resources than an actual supercomputer from 2008. Ask these people basic questions about something as simple and commonplace as unicode and they'll get it wrong more likely than not. This is why if you go on the orange site they constantly complain about having to solve the most basic problems during interviews.
So where we are right now is the medieval scribes stage of development. Most of these people's only skill is that they can write code at all, not that they're particularly good at it. Just like a medieval scribe's main skill is simply the ability to read and write at all, and not like, literary analysis or philology.
I think it depends on the school you go to. some programs are basically math degrees and others are glorified job training of the type your describing. of course, to get a job after school, recruiters expect you to have both the CS theory and direct experience writing code. they stop checking for the CS background after the first job because it's not something anyone stays proficient in, except in a rough heuristic sort of way. most training happens after you graduate in your first job or two.
the main differences between coding and writing are that 1. the former is predominantly a team activity and 2. the interface with the machine forces a maintenance burden on everyone that interacts with the code. in tandem, this means that if you write bad code, it's not just your problem - it's not merely that another person reading your code will struggle to understand what you mean but also that someone else after you will have to figure out how to change it to meet new needs.
capitalists try constantly to eliminate these factors and turn software into something that can be mass produced for no/little cost but they keep failing (for now) because they try to ignore the social factors (same reason AI code won't work for a while yet). that doesn't justify programmer egos, it's just an explanation of how software development differs from normal writing.
Well what I'm describing isn't really school specific. The majority of CS grads are careerists who really don't care about the actual field. At least in my achool where they are the biggest major. It seems they cheat through the theory part because they know they're gonna make 100k writing CRUD apps. This isn't a moral indictment or anything. I'm pointing this out to show that most professional programmers don't actually use any theory. What they do day to day should in theory should be trivial enough that most people could do it. In an ideal world that would be the case, and CS majors would only be needed for things requiring actual deep knowledge, much like professional writers.
I do agree that the issue is social. It's a matter of educational policy and for lack of a better word, orthography.
what I'm saying is that people have been trying to trivialize it for 60+ years and it hasn't worked yet - it remains a trade that takes ~8 years in and out of school to achieve useful proficiency.
I still think it takes a significantly larger amount of time to teach someone to read and write than it is to teach someone how to program. My point is that if it were that simple, corporations would have jumped on that ASAP and made it a commonplace skill, because then they wouldn't have to deal with worker shortages and they no longer would have to pay these people a living wage. I also think It's more akin to teaching someone stonemasonry or woodworking or something than it is basic literacy, and personally I refuse to spend any extra hours of my time having to deal with programming. I already have a job and I barely have time for my hobbies, I'm not going to spend my time learning how to do someone else's.