[beisner]

Nobody will argue that there are certain things you must be born with in order to learn to program. If you are born without a brain - literally without the brain organ - you likely will not end up a successful programmer. This is an absurd reduction, but the point is that there is a necessarily a set of physiological properties one must possess to program. The question is then whether a small group of people possess them, or whether a much larger group do. I err on the side of the latter; while there are definitely aspects of programming today that are pretty inaccessible (I’m looking at you, arcane Unix shell conventions and invocations), the fundamental practice of reducing abstract tasks into fundamental steps is a skill that I believe most humans have the ability to learn.