I learned programming on my calculator precisely for this reason, no cruft just pure code.
And for an inquisitive mind, having to type arcane command just to get the desired result is incredibly frustrating, and I don't count mindlessly browsing stack overflow or the internet just to get the stuff I need as learning. That is why course such as nand2tetris are incredibly good.
There is still an incredibly lot of stuff that can be done in matter of computer education. My dream would be a time travel libvmi based educational tool that allow to drill all the various function augmented with built in interactive explanation a la explorable and various code vizualization.
If this is the case, it is because people were conscious that there was in issue in how computer turned into more and more as an appliance mean to consume information [1] (The C64 had a full programming manual delivered with it, booted directly to an interpreter and even had schematic of the machine reportedly!) and tried to counter it.
Even then despite all the amazing ressource available, there is a risk of digital divide between people having access to tutor that can show the good ressource (because there is a lot of bad ressource!) and isolated people that are stuck with glorified engagement platform.
I've always felt the reverse, it's the doer that are in knee deep in the guts of various technological endeavor that display the most technological skepticism.
Without going down the "moral decay" debate and with all due respect to the coursera content, pedagogically wise nothing touch old video content (check out also the ATT science brief), like wise for the science books. It is only very recently that we have content producer like 3blue1brown or learnengineering that start to match or even exceeds those.
Yeah but I think the point made by this blogpost is to distinguish shallow blub (copy and paste info from stack overflow) from deep blub (go deep into the source code, instrument it and reimplment it) and that the latter allow for generalization and even practical understanding of fringe ideas.
"In short, if you’re in search of generalizable knowledge that compounds exponentially over time, then blub studies looks like the crap you have to wade through to get to the good stuff. So it’s easy to see why people give up on understanding all the blub they’re surrounded by, except what they need to get the job done."
Yeah, I have no specific example in mind, but lot of time I stumble on insanely cool project and the guy that made it have a relatively modest education and was content working a simple dev jobs that allowed him to work on his hobby project in the first place.
They should just open their own vocational school (or open up their own internal training center if they have one), you could say that they risk losing the students to other companies but if they focus on their own need and technology, inertia will go a long way keeping the student.
For the student that just want the training for a good paying job (no shame in that, there is still the internet and the various edx-like program to supplement teaching) a highly-focused, low cost and fast degree could be a perfect solution.
Another advantage for the company, we all know that while CS are good to teach strong theoretical background, all the tooling is usually learned on the go. Take microsoft for example, imagine how efficient it would be to have a student learn in a completely integrated environnement and perfectly use microsoft tools (mastering visual studio is an art in itself) at the end of the training.
There should be an "educational" mode on every computer where you can just boot into it.