Hacker News Reader

Totally disagree. Like any skill, all that's required is motivation and practice. You don't need some genetic trait or in-born talent to become a programmer, any more than you need it to learn a foreign language, play the piano or build furniture. As the saying goes: You don't need talent to practice.

View on HN

As someone who has spent nearly 6 months in spanish speaking countries, trying to learn spanish; I think language acquisition is a similar-but-different aptitude type thing.

I am just bad at parsing audio basically, I also have a hard time picking out lyrics in songs and whatnot. My spanish is terrible to this day.

I definitely learned some, and can stumble around by myself without english, but no one is going to mistake me for a spanish speaker.

I think programming aptitude is similar; for sure just about anyone could learn to use a loop and if statement to solve fizzbuzz type problems; but are they going to be able to modularize those control structures and come up with solutions for "real" problems?

I am pretty sure not.

Sorry, I cannot see this as expressing any sort of disagreement. I perhaps can learn how to play piano. If we are talking about some pieces for 6 y.o. kids. Can I learn how to play any Rachmaninov prelude or concerto? No, for me personally, this is not going to happen even if I had an infinite lifetime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com