[kabuks]

Thank you for articulating this so crisply. I realize that I have the same idea as well that "most people can't".

Where did we get this idea come from? I'm genuinely curious.

I've recently taken a huge bet in the opposite direction of this assumption that not everybody can learn coding, and I'm very interested in what (if any) evidence exists on both sides of the argument.

[mbeswetherick]

This paper doesn't necessarily answer why people can't program, it just points out some pretty interesting discoveries. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/reges/mystery/mystery.pdf

It's a paper that focuses on some strange patterns that came out of a statistical analysis of the 1988 Computer Science AP test. It turns out that there are a few questions that end up being a great indicator towards someone's natural programming ability.

Definitely worth the read.

[kabuks]

Great article. Thanks. This in particular blew my mind:

"“Educators of computer science have repeatedly observed that only about 2 out of every 100 students enrolling in introductory programming classes really resonate with the subject and seem to be natural-born computer scientists…I conclude that roughly 2% of all people ‘think algorithmically,’ in the sense that they can reason rapidly about algorithmic processes."

[justincormack]

But that is a quote from Knuth based on an older unpublished study, and seems to be a conjecture with weak evidence. Not sure it is actually mind blowing.

[aarlo]

I got it from thinking about it a lot, also reading Carl Jung...

Is dev bootcamp new? Looks cool!

[kabuks]

It is. Thanks.

It was born out of this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133

There are 20 willing students signed up to be experimented on in the spring. I'll definitely keep folks here posted on the results.

What does Jung have to do with this?