Granger makes a strawman of the coding-as-literacy concept by focusing on mechanical coding (as in "coding technician": someone who receives the requirements for a subroutine and implements it without any imagination).
Someone exploring topics in computing in an interactive environment isn't doing that.
I actually mention the magic of LISP and Smalltalk environments - they do greatly add in the exploratory creation process. But my "coding as literacy" strawman is born out by the industry: http://code.org/ and http://www.codecademy.com/ are great examples. By saying you can learn to code by following through some online lessons that teach you how to write some Javascript, we're doing people a great disservice.
Moreover, my real argument is that I don't think coding should be literacy. From the fundamental disconnect section:
> We don't want a generation of people forced to care about Unicode and UI toolkits. We want a generation of writers, biologists, and accountants that can leverage computers.
I don't think people should have to worry about exactly what the computer is doing if their problem isn't related to it. Specifically teaching general purpose programming as we think of it now is largely teaching people to build apps or command line tools. Instead of a generation that thinks of that as computing, we need a generation of people curing cancer with it.
Chris, as someone who respects you and your work, I'm interested to know how you would describe the "movement" aspect of coding-as-literacy. That's where I began to smell a strawman (even if not intentional).
Follow the money: what is coding-as-literacy but a government-supported effort to bring down the price of software developers, disguised as a public service campaign? That in itself is a strawman, yet I suspect that in talking about a "movement" we've taken for granted that leaders within the field (such as Alan Kay), and not just celebrities are advocating for this. Do you know of any?
Someone exploring topics in computing in an interactive environment isn't doing that.