"But when they do learn about “programming”, say in high school, what do they actually learn? There’s usually a lot of syntactic detail, but the top concepts tend to be conditionals, loops and variables. As someone who’s spent most of his life thinking about computation, this is really disappointing. Yes, these concepts are certainly part of low-level computer languages. But they’re not central to what we now broadly understand as computation—and in computational thinking in general they’re at best side shows."
Is our approach to teaching kids to code wrong? Do we put too much emphasis on what Wolfram calls the top concepts (loops, variables, etc) and language specific syntax - and not enough emphasis on how to think computationally?