People on this board have talked about programming as a gear in your brain that, to a first approximation, you have or you don't. I'm wondering if there's some well put-together resource you can direct someone with zero experience and just a web-browser to and say "if you're having fun an hour from now, you have the gear, good luck" -- maybe something on Khan academy?
(I learned to program a long time ago, and I started with BASIC program listings in my math textbook -- I don't actually know what the optimal onramps are now.)
I think you should give a more precise definition of the aptitude needed to be labelled has-a-gear.
I program for a living, and I would like to think that I fall among "those who can" on the bimodal distribution (if one exists). I've seen programmers and non-programmers of all levels of ability (except for far above mine, because those are hard to recognize). One man's programmer is another man's deadweight.
Individual people grow in talent until they stop (and maybe they resume later). So if there exists a test to predict whether they'll stop at some future level, it probably doesn't involve actual programming. (For instance, testing people's understanding of variable semantics is pointless unless you've taught them those semantics first.) It would have to test something else that happens to be strongly correlated with it. So
Incidentally, this was this was recently discussed on Programmers Stack Exchange:
For the record, I think programming is so measurable and has such a tight feedback loop that it is one arena in which it's relatively easy to recognize ability that far exceeds your own.
1) Code quality is fairly subjective, and in particular novice (very novice) programmers have difficulty rating code. Most professional programmers seem to be able to recognize it though, and feel awe when they come across beautiful code.
2) Code quantity can be misleading, but if you're on a team and producing a 100-line delta a day, you will notice the odd team member prod... (read more)