I think that programming is indeed something that you either get or don't.
I had an interesting expereience a while ago where I helped a friend doing a website. There was a backend involved where he would have to type some numbers into a table (how much of x, y, x... do you need when you are a certain age). I spent hours trying to explain to him why he couldn't just draw a graph on the screen, like he would on a piece of paper, and let the computer find out what the values were. He simply didn't get the basic concepts behind it and thought that the computer should easily be able to see the graph and decide what to do. He thought that is should be just as easy to draw a graph on screen and get the numbers from there as entering numbers manually.
It became apparent that he just didn't think sequentially and logically. Notions like if x is larger than y and y is larger than z then x is larger than z were extremely difficult for him to grasp. He isn't stupid by any means, he simply thinks about the world differently. And he would never get even a simple program to run no matter how much he tried.
I had an interesting expereience a while ago where I helped a friend doing a website. There was a backend involved where he would have to type some numbers into a table (how much of x, y, x... do you need when you are a certain age). I spent hours trying to explain to him why he couldn't just draw a graph on the screen, like he would on a piece of paper, and let the computer find out what the values were. He simply didn't get the basic concepts behind it and thought that the computer should easily be able to see the graph and decide what to do. He thought that is should be just as easy to draw a graph on screen and get the numbers from there as entering numbers manually.
It became apparent that he just didn't think sequentially and logically. Notions like if x is larger than y and y is larger than z then x is larger than z were extremely difficult for him to grasp. He isn't stupid by any means, he simply thinks about the world differently. And he would never get even a simple program to run no matter how much he tried.