Imagine a graph where one axis is how interested you are and the other axis is how quickly you pick it up. There is a diagonal line the separates those that will persist long enough to be a good coder.

This perfectly explains my own reaction/opinion when I started reading the comment that started this subthread.

Worded much better than I could have put it.

It's takes a lot more than interest. Programming requires intelligence. A lot of people are not very intelligent.

If you compare someone with quite a few of the ai bots out there (image recognition, chat bots), you will realize how intelligent they actually are. Every human person is like a super AI machine.