It seems a bit too similar to the idea that "most people simply cannot read".

We all accept that nobody can read without instruction, practice, and feedback. Why is coding somehow different? If anything, I think reading is more foreign/difficult, because coding is explicit thinking, and we all think. Whereas reading is a completely synthetic act that starts with arbitrary symbols that must be memorized by rote before you can even take the next step of using them.

None of us start out life being literate, but few people lack the ability to become literate. Why is coding different?

To elaborate on the sibling comments, coding is generative work instead of passive consumption like reading. This split becomes easier to see when looking at a bunch of domains.

Most of people can learn to read a book but very few can write a good book. Similarly, it's easier to re-tell someone else's funny joke than be creative and write original comedy.

Many people can learn basic physics equations like "f=ma" is "force equals mass times acceleration" but fewer are able to be generative and discover new physics equations that are accepted by the science community.

Most people can listen to music and appreciate it, but a smaller percentage can play instruments. And then within the set of musicians, an even smaller percentage can compose new original music. There must be something more to it than "training and practice" to explain why a 19-year old Chopin can compose sophisticated piano compositions while most 70-year old professional concert pianists that have performed for decades with more repertoire than Chopin have written no notable original music.

Coding may not be as hard as creating "Theory of General Relativity" but it's not the same as reading literacy.

Likewise, a lot more emails and discussion comments and school reports are written, per volume, than masterpiece books.

{people who can look at a real world problem, choose an appropriate physics model, and apply the right equations, correctly}

and

{people who can look at a real world problem, choose an appropriate logical model, and apply the right language/frameworks/code, correctly}

are probably really quite similar sets.

Most people can read in that they can translate text into sounds. However most people cannot read if require that they can accurately comprehend what the text says, just look at the results of reading comprehension tests, a majority scores horribly on them.

> Why is coding different?

You can get by just fine in life without accurately understanding text, but you can't get by just fine as a programmer without accurately understanding what code does.

Most people can modify a recipe, if the modification is natural or easily comprehended. For example, adding extra ingredients to flavour a food. But to invent one from scratch would be akin to creating a new type of food, or new way to cook, or a new way to combine cooking methods.

The same holds true for literature, I think. Surely, there are many people how can read and write a piece of text. However, there surely is a qualitatively difference between a gossip article from the magazine and Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Yes. Lack of reading is observable even inside code bases themselves.

Some contributors are more prone than others to not read the codebase they're working on and break patterns, use different file naming and folder structures, disregard currently existing code and re-implementing things from scratch, use a completely different code style, use tabs instead of spaces.

I don't think it's fair to assume that those people are doing this out of malice, or even to push their own style, because as soon as you mention that to them, they admit they were just not paying attention.

I do not think parent poster is referring to junior developers or just people on the streets.

Even though they work as developers and have experience they still don't get it. Just like people who mechanically read symbols and put it into words but don't get the meaning behind paragraphs or whole stories.

Remember that most people require extensive schooling for the better part of a decade in order to learn how to read.

I think you're probably right, but in a strictly semantic way: I think it's feasible that nearly everybody (excluding, say, the severely mentally handicapped) could learn to program to a reasonable level of proficiency, with enough effort. However, most people won't, so it ends up being the same as if most people can't.

https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Country%20note%20-%20Unite...

So your college probably need some more challenge. Put him on binary (assembly) optimization or something, where he doesn't have to come up with variable names.

That said, naming things is probably one of the most difficult tasks in programming.

I think, most people have potential to be able to code. By "can" I mean if they applied themselves to learning.

The problem is there's just no easy way to somehow transfer the knowledge and experience of what it means to actually code. The Doening-Kruger effect is in full force because you can't tell if you can code until you can. Moreover, almost every technology today must cater to complete beginners so it is easy to write a Hello World but then there is no way to tell you how to put your solution together. There is nuggets of wisdom but you need to have some prerequisite knowledge and experience to make use of them.

It is easy to see that I can't sight-read music. I mean I am amateur flautist but for some reason I just can't "get it" (but I also did not try hard). I know you can sight read because there are a lot people that can just take a printout and start playing it without previously studying it.

The same is not true with programming. It is not easy to see people do programming -- you only see results that you do not understand until you actually can code. You can appreciate the music but you can't appreciate the code until you actually can code.

It does not help that the whole industry is crazy right now. There is very small proportion of people with actual experience because of exponential growth of number of developers. The salaries are inflated and newcomers are getting paid as if they were experts in other industries. If you are getting paid a lot it means you must be valuable, no?

My time spent teaching makes me think otherwise. I saw so many smart, motivated young people who simply could not get their homework done. This was especially discouraging since my alma matter has a very strong focus on pedagogical programming.

There's something about programming that "clicks" for some people. They can look a the little pieces and immediately understand how to put them together. If you don't have that spark it's going to be an extremely challenging journey.

And if you actually are experienced and try to offer a newcomer some guidance in writing code that they won't regret having written a year from now, they'll accuse you of being a "perfectionist" who's wasting time trying to obtain some theoretical optimization.

A Holder type is a managed (RAII/garbage collected) wrapper that has a reference to some unmanaged/primitive object. If that primitive object is some notion of a contiguous region of memory, then MemoryHolder is a perfectly good name for it.

A name like "Buffer" might not automatically tell the users that the type is managed, or that it wraps some underlying primitive type. That may or may not be relevant to the user, but it's not obviously always irrelevant, at least.

Unproductivity that feels viscerally very productive.

Alternatively, command line tools tend to be created and increase the productivity of the more technically inclined, but are opaque to the less technical.

Which effect is the GibbonsRCool's Law? Or both? GibbonsRCool's Laws of Skill Drag and Acceleration?