Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science

I disagree with the last point. Understanding the low level details of a system definitely makes a developer more productive.

When I am working on an iOS app and I get stuck on a bug, I can open a disassembler and immediately figure out the cause of the bug. The same goes for a ruby developer who wonders why their queries are taking forever or a front end developer who doesn't know why their interface is dropping frames.

Any serious engineer should be able to fix these problems on the spot if tasked with it.

> It's perfectly acceptable to not understand the low level details of seriously used systems.

Yes, that's what my colleagues thought a few months ago, too, when they churned up a web UI for an embedded device. My teamwork was, apparently, insufficient to make them realize that a configuration interface that takes half the available flash space is rather large (the other half was taken by a goddamn kernel, a web server, a proxy server, a bunch of other networking tools, a logging service and all the tools that communicated with the web ui!). Lack of understanding regarding how routing works in TCP/IP networks also meant that their first attempt had a pretty fatal flaw which resulted in the configuration interface becoming inaccessible, which became apparent in the first ten minutes of testing and required a significant amount of redesign because the entire workflow of the interface depended on that.

Their Bootstrap wizardry was remarkable, but ignoring how the underlying system worked resulted in them having to start from scratch.

It works the other way 'round, too. Not understanding how web tools work would also make my systems programming entirely useless when it has to provide the infrastructure on which such tools rely.

No one likes all this complexity. I hate it, too. I sometimes truly, really wish my job was as simple as taking this thing from here and putting it over there. Ignoring this complexity doesn't make it go away though; building tools that can isolate some of it behind a comprehensive and consistent interface is ok, but relying on those tools to do it for you without understanding what they do is technical suicide. It's this kind of thinking that makes people think it's ok for a rudimentary word processor to take six fucking seconds to load, after asking you for a password, in 2014, on a quad-core system.

Edit: it's also worth pointing out that this is really beyond the scope of the article's argument. What the article insists is that this:

    var numbers = [7, 8, 1, 3, 2, 7, 6];
    numbers.sort();

hardly helps anyone learn coding as a problem solving tool. This exercise taught the reader exactly nothing about how to solve the problem of sorting numbers. I could ask someone who works for me to sort me those numbers, and my understanding about algorithmic thinking would be as rudimentary as before.

Teaching children how to use calculators does not increase their problem-solving ability, not by an iota. Teaching them mathematics does that, and their ability is further advanced when they learn about theorems and structuring proofs, about induction and, yes, about using a calculator.

It's the same here. I'm not arguing that computer science should be purist to the extent that you shouldn't use anything but a Number 2 pencil to program. That's stupid. I am arguing, though, that teaching people "to code", as if programming consisted in nothing but translating from English to Codese, is pretty much as retarded as teaching mathematics as if it were a language, consisting of nothing other than translating the English "Two apples and three apples make how many apples?" into the far more cryptic "2 + 3 = ?".

It's a false comparison. Algorithms, and data structures don't have a ready, real-life examples, that a new kid from middle school can already relate to. I suppose, you can point to facebook and google and try to explain the infrastructure behind them, but he still doesn't have a way for the kid to play with and see the consequences. I also think there's a false dichotomy implicit in your question.

Actually, you learn your first algorithm in elementary school, you just call it "doing an Euclidean division by hand". You're first data structure comes a bit later, in middle school, with vectors. That are just the first among those that I thought of, there are many more.

The point of all of these campaigns is to get people building software as a trade, or skill to MAKE useful products and services for other people, be it full time or part time.

The president and others don't distinguish between CS and programming largely because they don't know the difference, but my guess is also because making the argument about which is which is largely irrelevant to their point because those knowledge requirements vary wildly depending on the intent of the software.

For some pieces of software you don't need to know CS to make a successful product, for others you do. The whole point is to get the average person - or at least a larger amount of workers - to be able to solve problems and create solutions with software.