Those two things are the same in the context of this article, computational thinking is what you get when you learn to program. "Seymour Papert may have been the first to use the term computational thinking in 1980, when in his book Mindstorms he described a mental skill children develop from practicing programming."
The author is questioning whether teaching programming really is good for anyone besides future programmers.
This is not the case. Many believe that CT is a way of thinking that can be completely separated from programming, and taught as an independent thinking skill.
For instance, the article talks about the problems is assessing CT. There is no such problem in assessing programming, just ask someone to solve a problem using their preferred language.
(Edit I rewrote this comment considerably to try harder to see and address your point of view, apologies if you read the first draft)
I understand your objection to my first sentence given that the premise of these 'many people' you and the article are talking about is that computational thinking is separable from programming. What I was trying to say in response to the parent comment is that trying to teach programming instead of teaching computational thinking perpetuates the unproven idea that everyone should learn computational thinking slash programming skills. Programming is one way to acquire computational thinking, so if computational thinking is separable from programming, then teaching programming is a narrower more specific approach toward the same goal. And the author questioned the goal.
OTOH, I see value in the comment I replied to - I prefer the idea of using a term (programming skill) that people know what it means and both how to teach and assess it. That comment may have been agreeing with the article author that "computational thinking" too vague to be useful in practice.
Computational thinking is trying too hard to separate itself from programming. We don't know they're separable, and we don't really know how to teach any "thinking" per se anyway. We don't learn "physical thinking" or "language thinking", we learn Physics and English, and (just like in CS) mostly by example.
The whole reason there's a "problem" assessing computational thinking is that it hasnt been shown to be an independent thinking skill. It hasn't been successfully separated from programming. The only known ways to teach it is to teach programming, and the only known ways to assess it is to assess programming skill.
The quote in my first comment was straight out of the article, and came from the person who ostensibly coined the term "computational thinking", and he defined CT as the skill gained from programming. I'm not saying that computational thinking is the practice of programming, what I'm saying is that computational thinking is acquired mental skills from programming a lot. If there's another way to learn computational thinking, someone needs to demonstrate.
Solving a specific problem using your preferred language isn't what we're talking about, that's not assessing programming skill in general. That would be like suggesting you derive the quadratic formula once in order to assess math skill. To assess programming skill, and to gauge computational thinking, you would need to solve a variety of problems. You might have trouble trying to do it in a single programming language, and it's tempting to think it should be generalizable and you can remove the language part. But it is yet to be shown that this can be done.
Being able to roughly guess an underlying distribution by plotting it is huge. I'd imagine getting good at this from simple sampling would be even bigger.
On that note, anyone have good anki decks for recognising distributions? :)
Edit: I somehow lost the first paragraph I had here... Leaving the post, in case someone wants to answer the distribution question. But, apologies for the not sequitur to get to it. :(
