[disconcision]

this is an interesting one. i've definitely heard and entertained serious arguments that a CS education shouldn't even involve touching computers period for the first n years. it's certainly not something i dismiss out of hand.

personally I was turned off by programming as a kid, due in part to what I perceived to be a suffusion of hoops to jump through due to brittle, ugly, and unexplorable interfaces. in adulthood i was re-exposed to an improved tooling situation, and now i'm a professional programmer, actively working on (debatably yet better) tooling which at least a few other people seem to appreciate.

my current position is that different people want different things out of programming and computing in general, and that both of those are sufficiently abstract to accommodate different approaches. there is for sure a continuing need for people who are willing and able to run software in their head/whiteboard, but I also feel there are many others who could be making meaningful contributions but are turned off by the textural and tactile quality of 'computing as applied mathematics' which no longer encompasses the breath of the discipline.