I don't know Joel Spolsky or where he stands, but I do know that your little excerpt is maybe 5% of his point.

He is trying to say that schools only teaching Java are doing a diservice to there students and the profession because Java makes things so easy that people without the critical thinking skills needed for programming can still pass the course.

Not having a degree, or widespread experience with other programmer i'm probably not qualified to aggree or disagree. However I took plenty of classes where there were students confused by concepts like variable, and "code", not to mention if statments or functions and subs. I would have been thrilled to have taken one of these tough classes to weed out the others so that my own experience would have been more than teaching the other kids in my class how exactly you login to a computer and run pascal. ;)

But then I'm your regular home brew hacker and think that anyone who needs taught computers probably doesn't realy want to work on them. In my experience programming and logic are things you just have to inherently have and they can't realy be taught (/me sat throw several 'logic' classes and watched many people consistently not get it). Maybe I'm wrong, dunno. Either way your critical analysis of this "worst blog ever" realy sucked and lacked any basis or argument. So, if you insist on posting something with such a title, please back it up with some content and critical thinking of your own.