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50 years after Basic, most users still can't or won't program anything (www.zdnet.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 8 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Programming is alien. It's fundamentally hard to comprehend, because the computer will do exactly what you tell it to, regardless of what you mean. You have to think for the both of you.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I'm not sure I agree. I think most people can understand recipes or instruction lists and totally could program, if they wanted to and had to. They just don't want to and usually don't have to. They find it boring, tedious and it's also increasingly inaccessible (e.g. JavaScript tooling is the classic example).

    But I think mainly people just don't find it interesting. To understand this, think about law. You absolutely have the intellect to be a lawyer (you clever clog), so why aren't you? For me, it's mind-numbingly boring. If I was really into law and enjoyed decoding their unnecessarily obtuse language then I totally would be a lawyer. But I don't.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    There was a very noticeable drop off in people at my university computer science program after the first programming class. There is an actual wall there for a lot of people in terms of comprehending how programming works, things like assigning a value to a variable where difficult concepts to some.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    It sounds like the fact that people understand recipes or simple instruction lists means that they could transfer those same skills into programming. Would you consider cooking pancakes as abstract as writing a macro?

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