"How to teach programming (and other things)?" by Felienne Hermans

There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne Hermans ( [this video] ) that claims that all fields have an "exploration vs instruction" debate on how to teach their field, but this debate is apparently absent from the field of programming for the most part, wherein the "mess around and figure it out" exploration style of LOGO and Papert ("every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery") is the predominant unquestioned wisdom. Felienne wants more pedagogy fights. It's a worthwhile talk. I love LOGO and I think our generation of programmers are very sympathetic Papert's philosophy due to most of us being self-taught to some degree (you can see the fond nostalgia already on display in the comments here), but Felienne made me think about it more critically.

According to this person there is plenty of research saying you should tell them how to do it [this video] I think she makes a good point. We don't hand people a guitar and say "figure it out on your own". Cooking shows don't generally show the final dish and say "if you want to make this yourself figure it out on your own". You might say computer programming is different but I suspect for most people here you were taught things like sorting algorithms, database queries, lexers and parsing algorithms, etc. You were not made to figure them on your own. Sure maybe you were self motivated and looked up the topics by yourself but likely you mostly learned by looking at existing code and over time figured out how to see what it was doing and how to modify it or apply the same ideas.