Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I wonder if people who say "anyone can learn to code" would say the same about all endeavors & all people? eg, would they say "Any 12 yr old can learn to prove the same mathematical theorems that a mathematician can, as long as the 12 yr old really wants to & puts in the effort"?

Probably not. Coding sounds easy and indeed 'coding' in the sense of plumbing together for loops,if statements and function calls can be learned in an afternoon.But from there to actually -coding- there is a massive gap that may take months or years. Maths doesn't feel like that

I got a D in high school AP C++. I was a landscaper with illegals shortly after that. My daughter was in poverty and the dot com bubble popped. I still learned to code. Self-appointed "journalists" are not the hill to die on.

Nothing about getting a poor grade in a high school class would imply to me that someone couldn't learn any particular thing or excel in some field. That's perhaps the worst proxy ever, akin to using your performance on a game show occurring in your own dreams to gauge aptitude

That's a tragic pedagogical - not neurological - problem. There are prerequisites to learning anything, and, in this case, nobody guessed the missing prerequisite or how to teach it. Perhaps it's never been taught explicitly, and nobody who's learned it knows how they did so.

Sure, that's as reasonable a take as any. I don't think we even have a very good understanding of what that skill is, much less how some people come to have it. I'm definitely not claiming ability is an innate/immutable thing, just that *currently* not everyone can learn to code

Several months is rather short no?

Just like some people will never be able to read/write at an advanced level. Or at all for that matter. Same for following simple instructions. Intelligence has persobal limits, it is what it is.