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My ideal programming education was, essentially, being taught the basics at a very young age, and then figuring out the rest on my own with the help of the immense documentation, examples, tools, and communities on the internet. If you want textbooks, download them. If you want to RTFM, it's also online. And there are a billion possible complex projects you can set yourself to. Write your own compiler, write your own hobby operating system, write a video game, write a simulator for a complex physical system... lots of stuff.
I'm not sure either is better tbh, or if it matters. To learn to code, one needs to learn how to solve problems, and that requires 'teaching intuition' by having people solve a bunch of problems, whether it's initially 'calculate the nth fibbonaci number' or later 'design and write a simple video game'. But you also need to learn a thousand different general programming bits, plus another five hundred bits specific to a language, and that's gonna look like 'teaching knowledge' no matter how it happens (in 'java', what are all the types, what's an anonymous inner class, generics, type erasure, reflection, boxing, a reference, a package, how does the build system work). And - good luck 'intuiting' that, you need to read the docs or a bunch of stackoverflow answers that, when put together, are basically the docs.
So you need both, but good / motivated students of one will do the other by themselves.
Also, the problem with the brother's course / the processing.js thing isn't necessarily that it's too intuition-drive, but that it's too dumbed down. One could imagine a python course that was very 'teaching intuition', almost like a socratic method with code, but still used that to lead people through all the difficult parts of beginner programming, as opposed to just showing them how to move a cute little character around a 2d grid. (but then people would start failing again!)
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