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Re:Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In by vjz on Friday December 26, 2014 @01:59PM (#8799771)
Programming ability (similar to other STEM abilities) are power-law distributed, rather than Gaussian [1]. From this, it follows that training has very high probability of producing competent programmers but very low probability of producing exception programmers.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042813...

Re:Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In by arohner on Friday December 26, 2014 @02:54PM (#8800076)
Not necessarily. Surely there are people out there who have the potential to be exceptional, but never reach it, because they never got started, never realized they'd be exceptional, etc. Converting the potential exceptionals into actual exceptionals, is a very big win.