Just a nit with your complaints on CS education: Why, exactly, is it a bad thing for an intro CS course to force students to stick to certain language features to solve a problem? The point of an intro class is to make sure you understand that core portions of the language. Sure, there are often many clever ways to solve the problem and creativity is a huge part of CS, but for an intro class, I don't see this restriction as a big deal. These restrictions are basically checkpoints: yes, the student understands the difference between for and while loops. Yes, they understand how to employ a switch statement instead of if/elseif/else.

I don't see anything in this article that indicates that these students won't be getting a broad education full of History, Gov't, Literature in addition to STEM subjects. It even says right in the article that this is not a vocational school. It is just a public school that happens to have a more focused curriculum. That doesn't mean that the school can ignore the rest of a normal high school education. In fact, because it is a public school, still, I suspect it will be required to cover the same breadth of topics as any other public school in the state of New York. (Anyone from New York out there that could enlighten me on this front? I know it was this way for my home state.)

It seems to me that this school is just focusing in on electives related to software development. Maybe some courses will be mandatory that elsewhere the students would have chosen to take. If this school offers students what effectively seem to be better electives options in regards to their interests, though, why is that a bad thing? And why the assumption that this focus will have any effect on their ability to be good world citizens? Even my CS engineering degree in college required me to branch out beyond my major. I see no reason why a high school would do differently even if they weren't legally obligated to.

So I went to a similar school to this back when I was in high school, but the focus was general engineering vs. a specific focus like programming. I don't feel like I missed out on any social development or (as some might fear) academic variety as a result. The school, much like this one, had to meet state curriculum requirements, so the specialization was more like one class a year and then slightly more focused electives later on.

Socially, we still had a good mix of people. Sure, it wasn't as rich or diverse a group of personalities as I would've encountered my normal high school, but I'd petition that this actually helped me develop my personality far more than the standard experience would have. I think being around so many like minded people let me comfortably act like myself for the first time in my academic career. I was less afraid of ridicule for personality quirks that, in hindsight, really weren't that big a deal to begin with. I didn't exactly cut myself off from the rest of the world, either. I still interacted with folks from my middle school days outside of school time and stayed involved in my home high school's extracurricular music program to help maintain those ties.

Meanwhile, during all of this, I developed a simple set of skills that helped me adapt to college more quickly than many of my peers and, I feel, left me more prepared for what was expected of me. I have mild concerns that this school could be too focused too early, but I don't think that the diversity will be as big an issue as you believe.

To address each of the UI problems you listed here...

The profile photo problem...really? Click edit profile, click the link that says change photo...seems pretty straightforward to me. It was the first place I looked. This raises an interesting UI issue which is that intuitive for one person is clearly not for another. I agree that there can be absolutely atrocious choices for UI (for example, your complaint about circles. I have yet to find a person who is thinks Google+ handles this the right way) but I'm not sure the profile photo problem you had is the best example.

This wall complaint, though, is absurd. You're making the mistake of thinking Google+ is Facebook. There is no such thing as a wall. You don't post to someone else's wall in Google+. I know people who find this irritating, but this is NOT a UI flaw. This is a fundamental difference between Facebook and Google+.

Personally, I haven't had many huge problems with the UI. I enjoy the UI more than Facebook's, at least.