It's not the usual or appropriate notion of learning by doing. It's more analogous to going through math drill exercises in a book, or following step by step instructions in a lab (doing without understanding). Research on those techniques shows that students learn less than in more higher-order activities (simulations, games, projects, etc., see e.g. Wenglinsky, 1998, Does It Compute?).

I think better introductions to programming for complete novices would include things like visual programming environments (Scratch, Blockly), or editing/tweaking levels in a game, or making alterations to an existing simple game or animation, like the Processing.js ones on jsdo.it and other sites.

thats the thing though...people that know how to program know that programming is not about typing words on a screen.

patio11 brought up a good point in that in order to read one must learn the alphabet. I think this is very true but lets apply that here and realize codecademy teaches the alphabet -- not how to read.

"people that know how to program know that programming is not about typing words on a screen"

Agree. While I am not a programmer, I can certainly do enough to have made money with programs that I have written that have allowed me to achieve some goal that I had. Starting with editing shell scripts with ed and awk (a crude estimating system). To me it's fun. What can I do to automate something? How can I tweak this or that? I'm sure this is quite common. Fun. You want to do it. You like doing it. It's not work.

I've been doing this for quite some time now and found it fun right from the start and never get bored and it's always a challenge.

The bottom line though with all my learning has been making mistakes and figuring things out. In order to do this you need to actually make something and use it in order to think and come up with ideas on how to make it better and to solve the problems you run into.

Fine, Codeacademy teaches Reading (for beginners) instead of Reading (intermediate). But to imply that learning the alphabet is not the first step of learning to read, and instead is a separate thing, is totally disingenuous.

If you want to learn to read: you learn the alphabet first.

If you want to learn to code: you learn the basics first.

Codeacademy targets nonliterate coders, AKA people who don't know the alphabet.

It's pedantic to say that people aren't learning coding, just like it's pedantic to watch someone learning the alphabet and saying "You're not learning to read". Yes, they are, that's the entire reason they're learning the alphabet.