I think you are wrong. Let me try to demonstrate with a parallel example. > "es ist noch nie ein Meister vom Himmel gefallen" My best guess is: A master does

I think you are wrong. Let me try to demonstrate with a parallel example. > "es ist noch nie ein Meister vom Himmel gefallen" My best guess is: A master does not ready from heaven fall? One does not instantly become a master? Different people find different skills easy. So: ich kann ein bisschen Deutsch spreche. Nicht so viel, und mein Deutsch is nicht gut; es is sehr, sehr schlecht. Aber fur meine Ferien es genug ist. Ich hat drei Tage Deutsch gestudiert, unt es war in 1989. Drei tage, am ein bus vom Insel Man nach der Rhein. I am fairly good with languages. I can communicate in 6 foreign languages. Currently, I am studying Czech, because my wife is Czech, and I would like to be able to speak with her family, some of whom speak no English, or German, French, Spanish or anything else I speak at all. Czech is really hard. It makes German look like an easy beginner's language. In place of German's 4 cases, Czech has 7; in place of German's 3 genders, Czech has 4. (Czechs think there are 3, but really there are 4. Polish has 5.) I am somewhere past A2 level Czech, beginning B1, and I can hold a simple conversation, mainly in the present tense. But I started at age 45 and it took me about 5 or 6 years of work to get to this level. Basic tourist German I got in about 30 or 40 hours of hard work when I was 20 years old. I am not bad at languages. I am terrible at mathematics and very poor at programming. I used to be capable and proficient in BASIC and fairly good in FORTRAN. I managed a simple RLE monochrome image compression and decompression program in C, and an implementation of Conway's Game of Life in Pascal, and that is the height of my achievement. I am pretty good at getting other people's code working, though. Enough to be paid to do it for decades. I find Python quite hard -- weird complicated stuff like objects comes in early, and nasty C syntax peeks through even simple stuff like printing numbers. Lisp, though, switches from just about comprehensible code to line noise very quickly after the level of "Hello world". I got hold of a copy of SICP. It's famous. It's meant to be really good. I could not follow page 1 of the actual tutorial. Perhaps you know it. In section 1.1.1, it says: « (+ (* 3 (+ (* 2 4) (+ 3 5))) (+ (- 10 7) 6)) which the interpreter would readily evaluate to be 57. We can help ourselves by writing such an expression in the form (+ (* 3 (+ (* 2 4) (+ 3 5))) (+ (- 10 7) 6)) following a formatting convention known as pretty-printing, in which each long combination is written so that the operands are aligned vertically. The resulting indentations display clearly the structure of the expression.6 » The "helpful" pretty-printed part is incomprehensible to me. Section 1.1.1 is about where I gave up. I think that this kind of issue is not just me. Again: I submit that a bunch of people good at a very difficult skill are badly over estimating how good ordinary folks would be at it. Most people can't program. Most people can't do mathematics. Most people are not good at this stuff. The people that can do maths and can program mostly can only program in simple, infix-notation, imperative languages. Functional languages, or even prefix- and postfix-notation, is a step further than I suspect that 99% of humans can go. And the attitude of those who can do it to those of us who can't do it is really not pleasant.