My co-researcher was thrown in with the sharks on that project. He'd never even taken calculus, let alone any form of coding class. And this was Matlab, by the by, a language that not only holds your hand, but chews your food for you too. He never really groked matrices either.

We were a neuro lab, so coding was seen as something similar to a hammer: Bang away with it all you want, but at the end of the day, it's going back in a dark drawer where it belongs with the other tools.