Is it true that "not everyone can be a programmer"?

If the people like Atwood who argue that some people just can't learn programming are to be taken seriously, then by the same argument and same types of evidence, there are some people who can't learn science, or math, or reading, or how to speak or write. Because what the evidence is showing is that some people have difficulties learning some topics or take longer to learn them, and in many cases have misconceptions that make it more difficult to teach the topic to them effectively. And the evidence shows that traditionally taught courses (lecture/memorization based - taught by people not trained in more effective teaching methods like active learning) often do not significantly impact conceptual change of such students.

The Bornat & Dehnadi Goats & Sheep paper is interesting in showing that we can diagnose students who have significant misconceptions or lack of knowledge needed to learn programming (see similar research on concept inventories showing the same thing in a wealth of other subject areas). Beyond that the strongest interpretation would be that students with misconceptions are less likely to succeed in traditionally taught CS courses. Not that such students can NEVER learn the topic and NEVER be a programmer. I wasn't surprised to see their research wasn't published (although it is so easy to get such research published - especially when the peer reviewers aren't trained in educational research and learning theory, either). But a line like this would never stand up to peer review by people who are even remotely familiar with research in computer science education: "change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists." There are decades of studies showing various strategies that DO help more students learn and better understand programming and computer science concepts. Just because Atwood and others are unfamiliar and ignorant of such research doesn't make their opinions more right.

This seems to be a recurring topic on HN. The "goats vs sheep" study cited in the link's "highest-voted answer" has appeared on the front page at least once before, recently.

I am more interested in the meta-question: what are the implications of this question? I.E. if we knew for certain that the answer is "yes," how would this change our behavior (and likewise if the answer is "no").

I would think: if we knew for certain that some people can program and some people just can't, we would focus more energy on sorting people early on, to avoid wasting everyone's time trying to teach the unteachable. By contrast, if we knew for certain that everyone could program given the right circumstances, we would focus more energy on devising better teaching methods, etc.

Because of this, I am inclined to maintain a deliberate bias toward "no" (I.e. I am inclined to behave as if anyone could learn to program). Even if the answer really is yes, there are sure to be some cases where a "programming-capable" individual struggles at first for some reason, and an "anyone can program" general attitude is more likely to save them from mis-categorization as a non-programming "goat."

At least three essays by Paul Graham ("pg," the founder of this site)

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

http://paulgraham.com/determination.html

have referred to people making excuses for being lazy. I really like his expression of this idea in his essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known," the essay that drew me into reading his essays regularly, which eventually led me here to Hacker News:

"If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.

"I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."

It seems undeniably true that any teacher of any subject will encounter some students who, as the teacher finds them, seem to "get" the subject right away, and other students who struggle to understand even the most basic principles of the subject. But if the teacher gives up on the struggling students, the teacher is just being lazy. Israel M. Gelfand, a mathematician who was a great mathematics teacher, once wrote, "Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities. The job of a teacher is to turn these peculiarities into advantages."

The submitted article on arstechnica includes near the end a promoted reader comment that is very good:

"They were supposed to be learning Java, but there were always at least three students who didn't 'get it.'

"My solution was simple; get them as far away from the computer as possible (since programing is not dependent of computers), and have them "program" a group of people by giving one instruction at a time to do things like pace a room, or throw a ball. I'd teach them loops and the like by doing this for about fifteen minutes. It was fun and simple.

"After that, they'd be ready to Pseudocode, which meant they were ready to use Python. I'd have them write a working version of their homework in Python, THEN I would have them translate it to Java. Java was just too much as a first step (I will never understand the reasoning of teachers who introduce students to programming on anything other than Python). The problem was always that the class needed to be broken into smaller pieces that could be conquered, which in turn encouraged the once failing students. Victory is addictive."

That's what an effective teacher does--change the context of instruction, and draw in students with connections to what they already know. Some students entering a programming class would be ready to move beyond the approach suggested in the comment, and those students should be allowed to plunge right in to actual programming in a high-level language, but so far no one has developed a rigorous demonstration based on careful experiment that students smart enough to be admitted to an undergraduate degree program have some kind of invariant lack of ability to learn programming if at first they don't "get" the basic beginning steps in a typical programming class. Try a new approach and see what happens. Don't accept an excuse for being lazy as a teacher.

This statement from one of the cited studies caught my eye:

"All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve."

It's making an unwarranted generalization to say that this is evidence of people being unable to learn to program. It's more likely that each teacher has a methodology that can succeed with students having some set of characteristics, and the teacher assumes that because he or she can't teach a particular student to program, then nobody can.

In a college environment, the teacher probably has an inflexible, non-individualized methodology that is expected to work with everyone in a 100-person introductory class -- it's impossible for one teacher to give individual instruction to that many students. Our teaching system also implicitly assumes that everybody in the same class has the same background knowledge and can learn at the same pace.

Also, at the college level, many intro-level CS courses are taught by grad students. When I was a grad student teaching intro CS at an Ivy League school many years ago, we had absolutely no training in how to teach, so we pretty much had to teach our students the same way we ourselves were taught as undergrads. The same old methods get passed down and reused with little thought as to whether they work well or not. Better methods might have succeeded with more students, but the university didn't seem to give a shit about how undergrads were taught as long as some fraction of them did OK.

I think it's likely that a lot of people who can't learn programming from a college class could learn it if they were taught one-on-one. And I think this is true for many other topics taught in school: math, physics, writing, etc.

Sure, it is true. It is like not everyone could become a poet or even a fiction writer.

There are keyboard with all characters, notepad.exe and a reference of English language - go on, write a novel and become a new Selinger or Pamuk.

Almost everyone could become a coder - a translator from a language of specification to a programming language.

http://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Programming

There exist enough definitions of "everyone" and enough definitions of "programmer" to make the answer to this question almost worthless without context.

I'll leave this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I think it's a bit like learning written language. Written language is quite abstract too.

There are of course people with severe learning difficulties who are unable to learn written language (at least within any realistic timeframe). There are also people with more minor learning difficulties such as dyslexia who can learn but do so at a much slower rate compared with their ability to learn in other areas.

The difference is that written language is almost universally required in society. It's going to be very difficult to get almost any job at all if you can't read. Therefor the incentive to push through the pain barrier is very high.

So it depends on what your incentive to learning programming is. People who approach it because they simply see it as a way to make some $ will quickly realise that there must be an easier way to make $ that doesn't involve learning this stuff and they are probably right.

When I was younger me and a few friends were obsessed with video games. We thought that the coolest thing that we could possibly do was to make video games, people who made video games to us were like rockstars or pro athletes were to other people.

So we learnt to do some simple BASIC programming to the point where we could make text adventures with bleepy soundtracks and draw static sprites to the screen. First on BBC computers (which were popular with UK schools at the time) and later on DOS via QBasic.

In fact we even released a game as shareware, which gave us a hard lesson in conversion rates. Something like 10 shareware versions were ordered from the shareware library that distributed. Unfortunately nobody registered the full version (probably because it sucked).

I'm fairly confident that none of us had any real aptitude for programming. We had simply decided it was something that we wanted to be able to do at all costs.

My grandfather used to be an art teacher in his younger years and he found people would sometime claim they couldn't draw. He always responded that this was nonsense .. drawing involves making a mark on paper, and absolutely anyone can do that.

I think its the same with most things, anyone can program if they're given half a chance .. but only those with an aptitude are likely to excel.

My experience was of spending about ten years writing terrible code, and slowly building up ability. I think I am quite good at it now, but am probably just kidding myself. A lot of people just give up at the first hurdle. I doubt they lack the ability, just the drive. And if someone starts a CS course and has never tried to code they probably don't have the desire to learn.

Relevant to this thread, since the goats-vs-sheep study is brought up so often to add authority to the claim, Caspersen et al. were not able to repeat Bornat & Dehnadi's results. They discuss their findings here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1268845

I firmly believe that the human brain is incapable of basic mathematics.

When I add two numbers, say 145 and 394, I have memorized a few rules and tricks that let me break that down to something like 1+4 (hundreds), 4+9 (tens), add one to the hundreds, etc.

Or, I might figure out that this can be decomposed to 150+400 - (5+6) or something similar.

At any rate, I decompose the problem to sub-problems I have memorized the answer to: adding single-digit numbers.

This is basically the same process as programming. Are we asking whether people are "incapable" of mathematics? No. But we know that some people are way better at language than math. And that is all there is to it.

No but it is true that not everyone can do it well.

I'm not sure about the answer.

I am sure that not everyone should be a programmer.

No, it's not true

programming computers is like writing stories, except the compiler for programming is a dumb CPU not a living human brain

every human who has been appropriately taught has learnt to read and write.  They can also learn to code.  And pretty much the same proportion will make a living coding as do make a living writing stories.

But the future of humanity will be immeasurbly enriched by all it's people able to express them selves in code, just as it has been enriched by it's people able to read and write.

It will be a good future.

Now stop wondering if we are special, and start worrying how we can make a world that is so rich, so peaceful that the worst horror it's children face is curly brackets.

I have the impression that some programmers would like this discipline to be exclusive to a few people, like if it was only for the elite. I don't really like this kind of spirit, I simply think some people don't see enough interest in programming.

Not everyone has the will to become a programmer, but I refuse to believe that anyone with an average IQ can not. It's not like being a concert pianist where there's some sort of cut :)

There are many different levels of intellectual intelligence.

As a result of this not everyone can be a programmer, just as everyone can't be a rocket scientist or a microbiologist either.

Any can be taught to use windev or microsoft lightswitch and build "serious" business applications in weeks ... and be called a programmer

you need to raise the bar a little

It's only true if you work/learn/pair program with people that think this is true.

It is not about `can`, it is about `wish`.