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I've seen tons of people utterly fail to grasp the introduction to programming, and to be honest, I don't really blame them.
Many failed to grasp not the syntax of whatever arbitrary language the teachers decided to throw at them (often C++, Java or C#), but the core idea of programming: you're giving the computer a list of instructions that it blindly executes. So I blame the choice of language. The languages commonly used to introduce CS students to programming do not make it obvious what programming actually is, to the beginner it all looks like magic. Especially when OOP is added - without building it on top of something (the way it's usually taught is out of the blue and with flawed real life analogies), that's just pure magic.
People who might (I think) otherwise have become decent programmers if they had been taught differently get stuck behind the hurdle of figuring out the core concept for themselves (while getting bogged down in abstract concepts that aren't useful at that stage yet), and give up.
IMO a simple assembly language would make a much better first language. It makes the core concept explicit. It's conceptually simple. No confusing abstractions. The syntax is trivial. It really is as simple as a list of instructions. The only problem with assembly (hard-to-manage growth of complexity as projects get bigger) is irrelevant in this situation - you're only going to give assignments for simple straight line code at first, then some conditionals and loops, subroutines if you're brave, nothing unwieldy.
ps: I learned z80 assembly as a first programming language so I might be biased.
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