Programming benefits from the ability to tell stories, but many programmers are not great story tellers (i.e. communicators), its a skill that you have to learn separately, then your programming improves because of it.

I'm sure many more people make a living programming than telling stories (journalism, authors, etc...), but if you have evidence otherwise, would like to see that. Anyways, that has more to do with demand (for programmers vs. authors) than supply (those able to program or write).

so, I think most people get writing and symbols involved and that stories carry most of the functions needed for even reasonably complex programming

and that's without teaching children lisp from an early age

A story can't be 'wrong' as long as the grammar is used correctly. There (usually) are no hard requirements on the outcome or even the resource use of a story.

I'd rather compare programming to writing (classic) poems. Poems have a fixed structure, so the author needs to be economical and plan ahead with the syllables he uses and the story elements he introduces. While the outcome is still more or less open, we have to count in the artistic element (which is somewhat missing in programming), so this might introduce enough cognitive workload on the author to compare.

But in my opinion, the question is more : does every single people on earth like programming enough to get into it, instead of getting into something they enjoy more ?

Reading is easy, using an Iphone is easy. Bladesmithing, or repairing engines all day long is difficult, as is programming, as is writing for a living, or any other activity you don't enjoy doing on a daily basis for about 40 years.

It all boils down to (minimum) enjoyment of one's job.

p

Sure it can, have a murder mystery where Joe kills bob in the library with the revolver. Only problem is Joe was in Monte Carlo, and bob was Austin at the time of the murder, and there is no twist remote tele-presence robot. Stories must have internal logical consistency for them to work well. Something like Oceans 11 wouldn't have worked if there had been concurrency issues.

There are plenty of stories where unrealistic things happen, eg. JP Donleavy's scene transitions where people melt from one place to another (which are stylistic devices, not sci-fi).

This is a whole rabbit-hole (pun intended ...)

That doesn't mean those skills aren't useful. That picture of your kid might not make the cover of a major magazine, but Grandma is still going to like it just fine. That pot of homemade vegetable soup might not rate five stars in a restaurant guide, but your family is still going to enjoy it when they come inside on a cold day.

Most people are reasonably good at telling stories that are important to them -- telling your kid about what Great-Grandpa did in WWII, telling your buddies about the giant fish that got away...

Sounds familiar...

But if you mean writing great (usually more complex) software then no ; we evaluate/interview plenty of people, even with CS degrees who cannot program at all. And they had plenty of practice; still they cannot write anything which works over a few lines themselves and they don't have a real understanding of what they are doing (just learned stuff by heart). The end result might 'work' but it's never solid; it will have really strange bugs and no-one understands the code upon reading.

Like with many other professions, some people are just more cut out for it then others. Yeah I know we're all equal.. but the truth is we're not. Programming certainly seems like one of these professions.