I think the title was perhaps a misnomer, and it's distracting from the message. The author is arguing that we are miss-framing the literacy involved in program

I think the title was perhaps a misnomer, and it's distracting from the message. The author is arguing that we are miss-framing the literacy involved in programming, and that the real literacy is modeling. He's specifically comparing 'writing' as the act of putting words on paper to 'coding' the act of typing special words on the computer. So we're in agreement that there is an important literacy here to teach the masses. Importantly, the author highlights 'composition' and 'comprehension' as the real literacies behind the mechanical front of 'reading' and 'writing'. He argues the parallel is 'modeling' as the real underlying literacy here, and 'coding' as the mechanical facade. The article focuses on the parts that will be challenging for a long time, tackling the problem, getting ideas out of your head. This is much preferable to 'cargo cult' teaching of language syntax and keywords alone, although those are learned incidentally in the process, they aren't the goal. Paul Lockheart's 'A Mathemeticians Lament' shares many similarities in the field of Math, and is also, I think, applicable to software engineering. [PDF] https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....