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.