[aninhumer]

Just because those things are technically sufficient does not make them practically sufficient. Your "proliferation of middleware" (which apparently includes all modern programming languages) isn't just a convenience, it's absolutely essential to developing anything useful.

[theknown99]

Not really. You don't need to know about iterators, closures, generators, concurrency, exceptions, etc etc to be able to make useful software. Sure, learn about those things if it looks like you might need them for something, but all of those things are completely optional.

Learning programming at its rawest form, is giving someone a list of assembly code instructions, explaining what they all do, and saying "go build stuff". And it's fairly simple to learn. It can certainly be explained in a day.

Just like painting - give someone a pencil and paper and say "go make something".