I would say "No", because there's far more to programming than syntax. Eg, how do you explain things like scope, object lifetimes, and destruction without word

I would say "No", because there's far more to programming than syntax. Eg, how do you explain things like scope, object lifetimes, and destruction without words? In C for instance, there are various non-intuitive things such as that the string "Hello" is actually 6 bytes. IMO, syntax is the least important part of programming. It's far more important to understand what exactly that syntax does. Take for instance #include. It looks straightforward on the surface, but there are lots of un-intuitive parts to it, such as that you're effectively copy/pasting a file into your code, that you need include guards, that order can make and a.h can #define something that breaks b.h, that you need to #define _GNU_SOURCE to get some particular bit of functionality before a particular header... You can definitely write sample code to illustrate all that but I can't think of any way of explaining "what's going on" and "why we're doing this magical looking bit here" without using words.