It's an absurd line of reasoning. You attacked the presupposition that everyone should learn basic logic with the further presupposition that learning to reason logically is detrimental to the thought process of certain classes or society.

Aside from being needlessly exclusionary, the entire notion that learning basic programming "warps" your way of thinking is about as ridiculous as the inverse - that learning about color theory and basic art & design irrevocably turns us into illogical über right-brained caricatures.

I never said people should not learn basic logic. What I said/meant was that learning to program may shift how people approach problems, in a way that favors logical thinking, which may not be ideal for everybody. Programmers tend to approach and react to issues/problems with reasoning, but for some people (maybe some artists for example), they may prefer to be more emotional and irrational.

In my opinion, programming is not as simple of other forms of knowledge such as color theory. Knowing color theory doesn't mean you can paint well, just as knowing the syntax of a language doesn't mean you can write good programs. Programming is more about a way of thinking, and my entire point was that this way of thinking may not be beneficial/desirable to everybody in society.

Perhaps comparing it to color theory is a stretch, but I think comparing it to something like 'learning how to see' as an artist is apt, and highlights the absurdity of the position you've taken.

But knowing color theory doesn't make you a bad programmer. Why in hell would knowing basic programming inhibit your emotions?

so, an alternate example 1. speaking english will give people advantages 2. learning a new language may quite well introduce you to new ways of thinking 3. so you'd prefer that not everyone had the opportunity to learn english, regardless of the individual benefit to them, in order to maintain the kind of society you want to be in.

That is not the case at all. I'm not saying that we shouldn't give the opportunity to learn programming to everybody, I'm saying that trying to get everybody to learn programming (which, in the ideal case, the end goal would be pretty much everybody on the entire planet learns to program when they were young) may not be all good.

Just like we shouldn't force everybody to learn English. People who can speak English may think quite differently from people who can only speak Korean or Chinese or German, and I don't think it's good to try to get everybody on the planet to learn to speak English. Part of it may be cultural, as with learning languages (programming languages included) you are inevitably exposed to the culture.

As a non-native english speaker I assure you everything has a cost even a supposedly universal good thing like english. The more fluent I am at english the more my thought process changes. There are already cases where I find myself unable to relate to the simple joy that people around me seem to get for free.

Slightly off topic, there's evidence that not having the language to articulate a concept can mean it is incredibly difficult to understand. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/oct/21/research.hig...