this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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Programming
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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.
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.
How much of it is them looking at the curriculum and being surprised by the amount of mathematics and theory?
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?
Javascript tooling ♥