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Can Anyone Become a Programmer?

Posted by samzenpus on from the special-and-unique-snowflakes dept.

another random user writes "A Q&A on Ars Technica asks about an old adage that many programmers stick to: 'It takes a certain type of mind to learn programming, and not everyone can do it.' Users at Stack Exchange are wading in with their answers, but what do Slashdot users think?"

1 of 767 comments (clear)

  1. Re:There is nothing special about programming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't know about sour grapes, since it is a reasonable a priori position, but it is wrong as far as I can tell from the literature.

    Abstract. A test was designed that apparently examined a student’s knowledge of assignment
    and sequence before a first course in programming but in fact was designed to capture their rea-
    soning strategies. An experiment found two distinct populations of students: one could build and
    consistently apply a mental model of program execution; the other appeared either unable to build
    a model or to apply one consistently.     The first group performed very much better in their end-of-
    course examination than the second in terms of success or failure. The test does not very accurately
    predict levels of performance, but by combining the result of six replications of the experiment,
    five in UK and one in Australia. we show that consistency does have a strong effect on success in
    early learning to program but background programming experience, on the other hand, has little
    or no effect.