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It’s the problem-solving, not the language part, that requires special aptitude. You might speak a dozen languages but it doesn’t help if you don’t know what to say.

Besides, have you tried to learn a new natural language in adulthood? A bootcamp won’t get you far. And natural languages are really forgiving in comparison because you’re communicating with a human-level intelligence that’s used to inferring meaning from low-bandwidth ambiguous datastream.

How many times you come across a unique problem? Even when I come across a solution on my own, many times I find on stackoverflow or GitHub better designed solutions which address the corner cases which I didn't even think of.

Are problem solving skills something you are born with? To me the mismatch is that a traditional CS student spends more time practicing problem solving via homework and exam/exam prep.

> Are problem solving skills something you are born with?

Yes, most definitely.

Would it be reasonable to assume people's innate problem solving skills, to the extent they are innate, combined with how their problem solving skills have been guided pedagogically, fit a bell curve?

Is it reasonable to assume some people will land on the far lefthand side of certain bell-curve-fitting measurables, or unmeasurables, that lends them to being not particularly well suited for certain kinds of activities?

I don't know whether it forms a particular curve or what kind. But the fact is only a small proportion of the population has the innate talent for software development.

As long as people can practically attract a mate while lacking this sort of abstract reasoning ability, the majority of the population won't have it.

That's an interesting perspective: there's no genetic selection pressure for software development.

I've read that people tend to be intimately attracted to people of roughly the same intelligence and socioeconomic background, for whatever definition of intelligence was used.

Having said that, some people do turn out to become engineers fabricators artists and build amazing things. You're probably right though, the majority of the population probably don't have it.

So much this. There is a trend with these "techie" youtubers giving advice on which programming languages to learn first or which language is the easiest, etc... They are all missing the point of programming.

Which is the exact reason why when people ask for a language suggestion to start with/learn, I tell them all the same thing: "Oh sure, go through the CS50 manual on MIPS!" Personally I can't think of a period of study that affected my ability to problem-solve/reason about problems more than my time studying MIPS.

"I've no idea why coding should be anymore special than basic reading/writing skills."

Ok - maybe 'learning to write a few lines of code' - i.e. basic algorithms, should be 'no harder than reading or writing' ... or using Excel ...

But writing software, on the whole is a fairly intellectual exercise. It requires legit curiosity, intelligence, conscientiousness, etc..

"Code is a way to express solution to the problem which a computer can execute."

No, only in it's rudimentary form.

If every program was only 20 lines of code, I would agree fully, but since that's not the case, I don't agree at all.

Coding is like math. You have a problem, and need to reach the solution. Often there are specific and concrete steps you need to take to reach the solution.

Despite this, a lot of people just don't get math. Being able to go from an abstract problem to a concrete solution isn't just "write code until it works".

And like math, most people are "bad" at coding. By bad I mostly mean they get frustrated and don't see the point or don't get the rewarding feelings of solving something. They could get better, even great at it but they need to work very hard for a long time.

Not every human who can speak a language is a great speaker, storyteller or writer.

Writing a program is like a very detailed story that has to hang together. There can't be any loose ends in the plot or surprising twists that make no logical sense.

More than requiring language, programming requires thought.

The faculty of language doesn't confirm thought.

> Writing a program is like a very detailed story that has to hang together. There can't be any loose ends in the plot or surprising twists that make no logical sense.

Those lose ends are called bugs and they often appear in the code. Coding a collaborative task in most companies, even if you've obvious holes in your plot, someone will see and fix them if they are not obvious to you.