I couldn't agree more. When I recently taught someone (who's a complete newbie btw) to write a simple program in an introductory lesson (basically, take two numbers and a symbol ('+', '-', '%', '/') as input and output the result), she asked me if this was all her code can do.
My thought process was heading more towards how she just wrote code to build a calculator, but she was not impressed.
I'll never forgive myself for having introduced programming in such a moronic way. That's the day I realized, it's easy to know something, but to teach it to someone who doesn't know anything about it is rather hard and should be done in a well thought out way.