I see the application of computational thinking across every field as being a kind of dramatic continuation of this trend: taking things which could only be talked around, and turning them into things that can be shown through computation directly and explicitly. - Stephen Wolfram

From both a practical and theoretical point of view, I will agree with Stephen that this is the essence of computational thinking. Learning how to code is just part of it, certainly not an important part of it. It is the analogy of learning how to think and expressing it in a written or aural form.

Stephen Wolfram is right to criticize that loops and conditionals and variables are not the real point of the computation. It is not what kids have to learn at school as the first or most important part of computational thinking.

Wolfram language is not a conventional programming language, it is a powerful tool you can use to represent things in the real world in a symbolic form. It is a language where you can explicitly turn your abstract thinking of a problem to a concrete solution. Wolfram Language is the supreme aid for machine augmented intelligence !