Hi David

Thanks for your response and making me think. The statement you highlight may be of little use (I’m not sure about trivial, but more too specific an argument to bother with perhaps) to anyone but a Mathematician, but even in that case I think it would be an important statement also to a mathematics teacher, given their deep involvement in the subject. I would also hope finer distinctions around computing and programming are of importance to a computing teacher for the same reason.

I’m not saying programming is about programming though. Rather I was trying to see programming as a more concrete expression of the ideas of computer science and computational thinking. I do think this is a useful distinction to make for educators, without which we may as well be delivering a crash course in a programming language without bothering with the understating of how it works.