[daly]

Coding is easy. Anyone can learn to code.

What makes programming hard is the frustration. Almost everything you write will fail in some obscure way. The levels of frustration in programming knows no bound.

Even worse, very few people will be "software blacksmiths" who write code from scratch. Programming at most jobs seems to be writing glue code from one framework to another. Failures in frameworks are a whole new level of frustration. At best you hope that Home Depot has a new better framework in their software section.

And in the long term we will have managers who took a three-day "learn to program" course and wrote a working fizz-buzz program. We will hear "I wrote programs. It is easy. What is taking so long?"... a whole meta-level of frustration.

Programming is as easy as writing a recipe. I can read a recipe. But I can't cook.

So keep your expectations of these "learn to program" initiatives within bounds. Autodidacts who find frustrations a "challenge" will succeed just as they have in the past. The rest will find programming as interesting as algebra.