[Mvandenbergh]

The moment that a student dentist starts to drill into a tooth to place a filling (under close expert supervision and after a lot of training) for the first time they are doing two things: 1) Removing enamel that will never grow back - if they do it wrong, there is no option to fix a semi-colon and recompile 2) Doing it on a human mouth for the very first time in their lives.

The difference isn't just that most programmers don't directly have others physical health in their hands, although that is true. Some programmers do, but all dentists do.

The difference is that you don't get do-overs. Have you ever written code that didn't even compile the first time? Or code that failed a test, or code that did something wrong in a test environment, or code that did something buggy in production?

If you'd made a mistake like that as a dentist, a patient might well have lost a tooth that they're never getting back. Much worse could happen, you could cause someone to lose feeling to their face, even kill someone.

There isn't any low-stakes dentistry but there is low-stakes programming. That makes it easier to start as an entry-level programmer because even at a low level of skill and experience you can potentially do useful work for someone.