More importantly, she learned enough to gain this insight:
“Learning to program isn’t the hard part. The biggest challenge is figuring out how all the moving parts of a web application fit together. There’s no book for that,” she said."
It's easy to learn just html. Or to just learn if/then statements or for/loops. Or just hosting a site.
Something that could teach how to put the whole package together would be immensely valuable. The closest I've seen is the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl.
I'd love to see something similar done for different tech stacks.
No, I disagree with the quoted statement. Coding is hard. Try writing some code and letting it sit for 6 months. Then try to add a new feature.
Do you remember what display_user_data() does? How does that differ from format_user_data()? Wait, why did I write three model-querying subroutines when one would suffice? Oh, but now I'm passing six parameters into this subroutine...
I'm excited for everyone learning to code this year. It's a great time to learn! But remember that your code needs to (a) make sense in its design, and (b) make sense in its design six months from now. Does your code make sense after taking a vacation, working on other projects, and forgetting the abstractions you rolled with?
Programming is hard. Learning how to write code that is sufficiently modular that you don't have to keep a whole project in your head is hard. Figuring out patterns that retain modularity whilst giving good levels of performance and memory usage is even harder, by about another order of magnitude. Learning how to put together a django project and push it to heroku doesn't even rate compared to the learning curve for being able to write large bodies of code.