My assumption was that people who can't seem to learn to program can't get to the gut-level belief that computers don't use natural language-- computers require types of precision that people don't need.

However, this is only a guess. Would anyone with teaching experience care to post about where the roadblocks seem to be?

Also, does the proportion of people who can't learn to program seem to be dropping?

On the other hand, I did the JavaScript tutorial at Codacademy, and it was fun of a very annoying sort-- enough fun that I was disappointed that there only seemed to be a small amount of it.

However, I didn't seem to be able to focus enough on the examples until I took out the extra lines and curly parentheses-- I was literally losing track of what I was doing as I went from one distant line to another. If I pursue this, I might need to get used to the white space-- I'm sure it's valuable for keeping track of the sections of a program.

My working memory isn't horrendously bad-- I can reliably play dual 3-back, and am occasionally getting to 4-back.

If there are sensory issues making programming difficult for a particular person, this might be hard to distinguish from a general inability.