[jfarmer]

I'm one of the co-founders of Dev Bootcamp, although I'm no longer involved day-to-day. What it means to "learn to program" is nebulous. As you pointed out, a person regurgitating things they've seen is able to "program" in some sense.

What I can say that the priority is not so much teaching them X, Y, or Z framework, but teaching them what it means to "think like a programmer." You might not think that is teachable, but, well, empirically falsifiable. :)

I'd definitely call students who went through DBC "programmers." Many of them remark after graduating that they never realized how little they really knew. At the very least, we get them from unconscious incompetence to the bottom rung of conscious competence.

If all I were doing were teaching folks "cords[sic] from 10 popular tunes" I'd have no interest in doing it at all. Real programmers or bust.

I can't speak for anyone else, of course.

[jballanc]

I have always been a huge proponent of the concept of teaching the art of learning, as opposed to teaching a specific skill. My concern is that, as Rich discusses, truly learning to program is a slower process, at the outset, than learning how to piece together a handful of frameworks and code snippets from Stackoverflow.

A proper education lasts longer than the duration of the actual instruction, so I trust that some of these "short term" programs can still make programmers (and anecdotally, I've heard good things about Dev Bootcamp).