"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
That's a lovely idea although I can't help noticing that I know of no shipbuilding companies based on the teaching of yearning while I do know of some that seem based on organising a workforce. I suspect that this is one of those ideas that while beautiful is far from being literally true.
How about "if you want your citizens to fund a space program, don't gather the workforce to build a spaceship but teach them to yearn for the vastness and potential of the void."
programming is already such an opaque concept before you learn it, kids entering the class won't even really know what programming is.
if you start with a single-minded focus on syntax, as most do, the kid's mental model of programming becomes "programming is done by entering premade code words that someone made up. if i want to do something, i need to find the premade code word that does that thing".
as opposed to, "programming is about blobs of information and what i do with them - changing their shape, organizing them, picking certain things from them, taking stuff away from them. if i want to solve a complicated problem, i won't start typing, i'll start thinking about how i'd make a machine that makes the blob i want. the best way to make a machine like that is usually out of smaller machines that live inside it. i'd figure out what the smallest machines i need are, and i'd make those, and then use those to make the bigger machines, until i'm done."
if kids were started with a functional, problem-solving oriented approach like that, you'd create very capable programmers much faster. this applies to introductory CS classes in college. i went into my first CS class knowing absolutely nothing about programming beyond CSS/HTML - i was a math / mech eng major at the time. i think it was the third class where they had us write a program in C that did some non-trivial dynamic allocation. they never told us things like what the heap or the stack are, or the concept of a memory leak, what happens if you dereference a null pointer, etc, etc. i never got that program to stop segfaulting. i came very close to failing that class and was told, because of that, i probably shouldn't continue with CS. i taught myself computer science instead and now i know that i'm not stupid or unsuited to programming - my introductory CS education was shit.
The commenter right above you expressed the same issue, and I wrote a longer reply there. But it's not that I don't think syntax is important, but I don't think we should pretend that the value in learning to code is learning the syntax. What I'm reacting to is "coding" programs that seem to eradicate any semblance of forcing kids to confront hard problems in favor of presenting them with trivial exercises for the sole purpose s of claiming "they can code."