You're kind of off-base. A formal computer science education doesn't really teach coding at all. You'll learn how to write code (hopefully) as a corollary to learning how computation works. At least in my program, there isn't any single course that's oriented around the act of writing code.
That may be true but it's not responsive to his real point, which is that you don't need to understand computation to build a typical line-of-business application.
Companies used to build LOB apps in Microsoft Access, and nobody believed you needed a degree to use Access (plenty of business people figured it out for themselves, just like Excel). Now nobody uses Access anymore, but the web frameworks that replaced it aren't that much harder to use, and don't really involve a lot of complexity theory or parser generators.
In some ways understanding computation actually undermines you.
Here's a true story, a few years ago I was a DBA on a large-ish Oracle database (~50T) supporting many users. One guy would run his report, and it would time out (in his client software, Business Objects I think). So he would run it again and it would time out. But on the 4th or 5th attempt, it would work! Why was this? I was curious enough to investigate and what was happening was he was gradually getting more and more of his working set into the cache, and eventually he had enough in-memory that his query could complete in time. Let me tell you for sure, that guy did not have any mental model of computation that led him to discover this. He just tried it and it worked. Would a guy with a classic CS education have done this?
While his solution worked for him, it also revealed a flaw that could've been a deal breaker if sales were demoing the system. Of course what constitutes a significant problem is often up to a nontechnical department.
It really depends. Mine had a whole lot of classes that focused more on the theoretical CS, but I had two different assembly language classes, for very different processor architectures, and I had a class on OO that, fr all intents and purposes, was about teaching practical programming. Different schools do different things.
One thing seems pretty clear to me though: If you let people that can't write code graduate, you are doing them, and your program, a disservice. The most theory driven industry jobs I have ever seen, and I have seen many, require coding competence.
