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I remember helping a friend with his intro to CS homework in college. It was fizz-buzz type programming and extremely simple, but he could not understand what the code was doing or how to change it to make it work. And this friend is very smart and successful in his career.

Things that seem easy to people who already know how to program or who have the mind for it are very confusing to people just learning.

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And for others it goes quite quickly! There is no doubt that programming can be helped with a natural aptitude and that it won't make sense to everyone no matter how smart they are, but that is true of many fields.

I'd also argue it's often a teaching problem. I'd highly recommend this essay that goes into the flaws in particular with introductory CS education:

https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/Developing_Developer...

Thanks for that link! That six-step design process appears to be a formalization of what I've learned to do subconsciously from years of experience. I've been struggling with mentoring junior colleagues wrt the software design process, and I'll be trying that six-step approach as part of my mentoring.

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