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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Even more interesting to me is if one could create a test for prospective programmers that could be taken before one even knew how to program and would distinguish people who would be good at programming and those who wouldn't. Is this even possible? Programming is more complex than learning a new human language in that there are a lot more things that go into it than just knowing the language. But it's clear that some people are better at both programming and learning new programming things. Could one find a verifiable way to predict this ahead of time?

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This has been studied

http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr...

One US university used to (may still) have a program where they would take relatively non-technical people off the street, and if they could pass an aptitude test would consider them (interview) for a programmer training course. This test was notorious for the failure rate, but the program consistently produced coders who quickly became able to maintain the university's systems. (Trainees were taught a procedural language for a mainframe, but in the early 2000s they were gradually migrating to web and Java.)

This test, supposedly developed by IBM in the 1960s, had nothing about programming. It was all pattern recognition - look at a series of geometric figures and predict the next, and some variations on this concept.

I was skeptical of the suitability of this test, but the U. was convinced by the apparent results.

I suspect that at least two aptitudes are involved, and different programming languages/platforms place different demands on those two aptitudes.

One aptitude is essentially the math/engineering ability. The other is linguistic.

Also the working memory and a certain willingness to sit there doing purely mental work for significant periods of time (well I guess the latter is part of 'math/engineering ability'). The working memory aspect is what makes this sub-thread not a complete digression.

FizzBuzz, pseudocode variant.

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