I think it's a bit like learning written language. Written language is quite abstract too. There are of course people with severe learning difficulties who are

I think it's a bit like learning written language. Written language is quite abstract too. There are of course people with severe learning difficulties who are unable to learn written language (at least within any realistic timeframe). There are also people with more minor learning difficulties such as dyslexia who can learn but do so at a much slower rate compared with their ability to learn in other areas. The difference is that written language is almost universally required in society. It's going to be very difficult to get almost any job at all if you can't read. Therefor the incentive to push through the pain barrier is very high. So it depends on what your incentive to learning programming is. People who approach it because they simply see it as a way to make some $ will quickly realise that there must be an easier way to make $ that doesn't involve learning this stuff and they are probably right. When I was younger me and a few friends were obsessed with video games. We thought that the coolest thing that we could possibly do was to make video games, people who made video games to us were like rockstars or pro athletes were to other people. So we learnt to do some simple BASIC programming to the point where we could make text adventures with bleepy soundtracks and draw static sprites to the screen. First on BBC computers (which were popular with UK schools at the time) and later on DOS via QBasic. In fact we even released a game as shareware, which gave us a hard lesson in conversion rates. Something like 10 shareware versions were ordered from the shareware library that distributed. Unfortunately nobody registered the full version (probably because it sucked). I'm fairly confident that none of us had any real aptitude for programming. We had simply decided it was something that we wanted to be able to do at all costs.