How to teach to code (a different approach)

My favorite quote:

> "By showing them the full complexity of the target language, even at the early stage where all they can do is 'find and circle the subject of each sentence', you are beginning to teach them what their writing will look like on that distant day when what they produce is full-fledged speech. And, critically, you are not allowing them to mistake the crude and lopsided sentences they create in their homework for the real, fluid, and graceful language that is French. "

My Spanish teacher once said that you should listen more than you speak. When you listen, you learn. When you listen, you will be subtly exposed to concepts that cannot be taught well by describing them: how words sound, the flow of a sentence, patterns in sentence constructs (ex reflexive verbs, indirect object), and what sounds right. When you're speaking, you lose that opportunity to learn and you are relying solely on your own knowledge. You miss the opportunity to grow. You are only practicing and you drilling.

Likewise, in coding, this immersion into code is comparable to listening: you learn language patterns and some formal syntax, you learn new 'vocabulary', and you learn what looks right. Writing code (speaking) on your own when you start learning how to program is the same as hardening nonexistent skills in a subject you are completely new to.

I can agree that teaching people how to code well is more important than teaching people the grammar of a computer language. Then again, that fact is supposedly pretty obvious, and yet the existing approaches to teaching programming or development obviously suck - a lot. So how does author hope to change anything through blogging what could not be changed through awareness?

This is very much a political decision, I'd think. So go out and... do?