This reading was interesting, because to me it brought up the difference between programmers, and non-programmers. It seems to me that people who are programmers, computer scientists, or people who are just knowledgeable computers have accepted certain limitations of computers, and choose, perhaps subconsciously, not to challenge them. One problem with programming languages, which was mentioned in the article, is their degree of linearity.
Simple tasks can be difficult to achieve in an iterative language.
It is no easy feat - you have to have threads, or fork processes, and then resynchronize them into one process again. The programmer would say this because they have preconceived notions about the difficulty of the task. The comment Resnick makes about Rocky's Boots and Robot Odyssey struck home for me. I remember using both of these programs as an elementary school student. They allowed me to begin to learn about logic circuits early in my life.