If you look at the learning curve of a lot of things that programmers favor over "normal people", they tend to have a thing in common, which is that they have s

If you look at the learning curve of a lot of things that programmers favor over "normal people", they tend to have a thing in common, which is that they have some sort of step right at the beginning. Markdown, for instance, you have to learn the syntax, and then learn something to do with it in most cases (e.g., put it out on your blog). It's fairly easy after that in most ways, but there's that step at the beginning before you can do anything. Most people receive the training where opening up Word is not difficult, and then once they've done that, there's no step up. They press "a", an "a" appears on the screen. They have buttons that do things like italicize. The first few steps are easy. It may be the case that after that there is a brick wall in the difficulty curve, whereas the programmer-favored solution is a smooth easy curve for quite a ways. But that first step is sufficient to block most people, and people are often happy to just give up in the face of the brick wall. This is not unique to programmers. A lot of the "maker" disciplines have a similar step curve. A lot of times it's just that first step that is the hardest overall. But it's enough.