I think you have a point. The idea that the programming language and its standard library are lego bricks, and you have to find ways to assemble them into somet

I think you have a point. The idea that the programming language and its standard library are lego bricks, and you have to find ways to assemble them into something resembling your problem can be hard to communicate. I've certainly seen people - smart people who'd previously written very complex things in Excel - just go completely blank at the stage when it comes to turn a task into a computer program. You really have to drill the breaking the problem down into smaller and smaller parts stage. But I'm only partly convinced. People really do struggle with syntax early on. Not remembering it, but spotting mistakes. Seeing some opaque error message and not having any idea that is connects to a missing ;})] really frustrates people. Especially since your brain is automatically editing away the syntax for you as you read. Also sometimes it's really hard to convince people that formatting their code sensibly will help them with syntax.