This is a very valuable point of view. Everyone understands that coding is only going to become more relevant to the world as a whole, and those who understand coding remember how empowered they felt when they first began to think about solving problems from the point of view of a program. It seems obvious that we should teach programming skills as early as possible to capitalize on the "magic capacity for learning" that kids have. We know this works for language. But does it work for abstract thinking?

No one remembers how they learned things at an elementary school age. I think the reality is our understanding of concepts was very muddy at that age. Thinking about abstract concepts still requires a lot of context that kids don't have. I'm not sure kids can really grok the importance of the abstract concepts in programming, and I'm not sure that importance can be taught directly. I think the ability to grok those concepts comes from a bank of general world knowledge that must be slowly built up to in adolescence.

Teaching programming early on may give kids a few worthwhile mental tools, but I'm not sure we can expect kids to get any magic "fluency" benefits the way we can with language. The risk of turning kids off programming by forcing them into it early may outweigh the benefits.