I suspect you have not spent any time with a child lately in a teaching context, if ever. Yes, I'm perfectly comfortable saying people have no innate sense of p

I suspect you have not spent any time with a child lately in a teaching context, if ever. Yes, I'm perfectly comfortable saying people have no innate sense of programming, even if I simply discard babies and toddlers (which is a pretty large concession to be making). Some pick it up more easily than others but nobody is simply born with it. Unsurprisingly (for an HN poster), I'm on the higher end of talent myself in general, but I still remember when I realized programs don't need line numbers, how closures work, etc. Pointers was no big deal to me but I still wasn't born knowing about them, and while pointers to pointers posed no conceptual difficulty in what they are in some brute sense, grokking what could be done with them was a process. I don't think even Knuth learned what pointers are and immediately would have derived the Dancing Links algorithm without conscious thought.