[joeroot]

This highlights how "good" programmers are simply those who are most able to think like a computer. The article's language further reinforces this (perhaps intentionally), e.g. the reference to "compiling" functions.

I find this contraint interesting - I don't know if computational thinking is a strength or a weakness. Increasingly, it seems that computational models occur naturally and therefore the ability to think in such a manner would have inter-disciplinary value.

If we deem it a weakness, then programming becomes a UX problem rather than language one. The lack of change both within and across programming paradigms would suggest that many don't believe this to be a fundamental issue.

[MaulingMonkey]

I'd place my skill bars higher: "thinking like a computer" seems fundamental: I don't think one can even be a mediocre programmer without it, and it's not enough to make you a good programmer.

A good programmer also needs to be able to effectively communicate through code to both others and themselves, know how to design maintainable programs, how to preemptively avoid bugs by making their code harder to misuse, and too many other skills to list here -- and not all of those naturally flow from knowing how to think like a computer.

[jared314]

This actually touches on Alan Kay's statements about programming with "what" instead of "how". It has made me seriously consider logic programming for the applications I write.

[eli_gottlieb]

Computers don't think like computers. Computers reason formally. Thinking like a computer is just a matter of learning to reason formally and exactly instead of employing fuzzy mental abstractions.

This is primarily hard because we're wired for fuzzy mental abstractions, since they make loads of tasks (natural language, making breakfast, manual labor) far easier compared to taking genuine formal approaches, and we have a lower layer of the brain that can be trained to follow exact procedures quite well anyway.