I've taught programming to thousands of children, teenagers, and adults for a bit over a decade now (not exagerating, I've been through the exercise of estimati

I've taught programming to thousands of children, teenagers, and adults for a bit over a decade now (not exagerating, I've been through the exercise of estimating, for each of my gigs, how many students I've interacted with directly), in a wide variety of contexts (summer camps, bootcamps, middle schools, undergraduate classes, etc.), using a wide variety of languages (C, Python, Scratch, Ruby, PHP,...). The things you quote are typically not much of an issue. Once you tell students what a string is, or you show them how to type | or ^ or & or whatever weird symbol, they typically remember it (of course, you'll get some "oh yeah I need to use that weird squiggly thing here, how do I type that again?" - and as a fun tidbit, students in 2016 have no problem remembering and typing the # symbol (aka a "hashtag") ). The bigger issues come from more macro level things, like understanding that the code gets executed on a line by line basis and can't "read the future" (i.e. you can't use a variable if it's only declared 10 lines later), what scoping is, how to combine conditions together to make a loop that does what you want it to do, and so on.