>>34As implemented, yeah, their attempts will (as a generalization) only churn out code monkeys and will do nothing for those who would pick up programming anyway. That's probably their intent, given how the movement is being spearheaded by leaders who could use more code monkeys.
The comparison to alternative music isn't quite accurate, though, because `programming' (not on career-level) is still quite useful. Not in the sense of ``can write epic webapps and enterprise-level abstraction layers!'' but in the sense of ``can write simple to moderately complex shell scripts, and can probably understand how to go about understanding various user-visible scripting systems built into programs''. That, I think, might be a useful type of message. Not everybody is going to write epic webapps, but I think everybody, at some point, will look at a task like organizing their CoD montage videos and think ``Gosh, this would be easier if only I could prepend the time of creation to all these filenames!''
The movement isn't focused on teaching that sort of thing (and you could argue it isn't `programming'), but it could be. Even despite the current efforts, the end result might be kids learning that computers aren't magic youtube boxes, that they can do lots of other things as well if you tell them how.