If you look at other articles at CodingHorror, I don't think Jeff Atwood associates coding with things like "algorithmic thinking" (which is not necessarily bad

If you look at other articles at CodingHorror, I don't think Jeff Atwood associates coding with things like "algorithmic thinking" (which is not necessarily bad, he just has a different focus), but do courses of "learning to code" teach it all that much? For beginners learning to code is more about just learning to "make the computer do" simple things via learning all the terminology, syntax, the deciphering of compiler error messages etc. It takes plenty more effort to learn some theory along the way and this is most likely to happen in an academic setting and the popular courses are really more about craftsmanship. Robert Sedgewick has a nice "Introduction to programming" course followed by an "Introduction to CS": http://introcs.cs.princeton.edu/java/cs/ http://introcs.cs.princeton.edu/java/cs/ It sure could be useful to a wide audience, especially for people in science. For people in general? I think not more than hundreds of other skills. People in every discipline tend to think what they do is the pinnacle of all understanding, this is especially visible in academia and in schools, but in the end you cannot know every thing that potentially could be useful. Of course this shouldn't stop people _interested_ in programming from learning it.