Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but I'm comfortable saying I've taught at least 250 people to code and absolutely 0 of them were capable of programming right

Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but I'm comfortable saying I've taught at least 250 people to code and absolutely 0 of them were capable of programming right when they had learned just the syntax. For most of those students the difficult part was structured thinking without deviation and carefully stepping through their own code mentally to figure out if they were going to write something that made semantic sense.