A lot of the observations in this article are very interesting, but personally, I drew different conclusions.

The first one is the main thesis of the post which is that some people have an innate ability to program that others do not possess, and that this is a thing that cannot be learnt. As a result, telling people that it is "easy to code" is a lie.

Firstly, it is actually not clear to me that this ability to pick up programming principles cannot be taught. All we know is that our current methods of teaching yield a double hump distribution for programming ability.

Secondly, if people were actually saying "you will find coding easy" to anyone and everyone then I agree that they are probably concealing the truth. But actually, if you read the tagline on the example given (The Year of Code initiative) it says:

> Start coding this year, it's easier than you think.

"It's easier than you think" (emphasis mine). This is quite a different statement to a flat out "it's easy", and it's one I agree with. To most people, coding appears difficult because they simply don't know the answers to a few key questions (E.g. Where do I write the code? What do I do to run my code? How does the computer understand what I've written?). The (basic) answers to these questions are comprehensible to most people, and furnish them with the ability to write code (maybe not well, but that's a whole other story).

Next observation:

> Folks, which industries/professions give up their own free time to provide free/open training to people wishing to enter the sector? Curious

The fact that only the software development industry seems to do this is painted as a negative thing in the article. Why is that? I ask because this is a fact I think we should be proud of. I personally enjoy what I do so much, that I happily spend time out of my week, teaching it to others for free. I don't do this because I think all the people I teach will go on to become successful software engineers, but rather because I want to widen the net, and expose more people to what we do, because for some of them (maybe even just one of them) this might be their "true calling".

I got into programming originally from watching a cousin of mine editing the themes of his Wordpress blog. He went on to study English Literature and Psychology; To him, coding was just this tool that allowed him to publish his views, but to my 9 year old self, watching him, it really struck a chord and I was hooked. Now, there is not a thing in the world I could imagine myself doing rather than writing code and loving every minute of it (And no amount of "social status" is going to turn me to a life of law, medicine or architecture). What an opportunity I would have lost if I had not seen my cousin working on his blog... Every week-long learn to code course, and every "hour of code" initiative works towards bringing such opportunities to the wider public.

Finally, on the role of Computer Science degrees: I am currently in my final year of a Masters in CS, which I have also enjoyed studying immensely. I would not say that it has contributed directly to my skills as a software engineer, but the things I have learnt have changed the ways in which I approach problems. Very few people write structural induction proofs, loop invariants or abstract specifications to prove the correctness of their programs, but I have found them to be great ways to think about how to write better code. These skills, however, are complementary to those that make a good software engineer, not a substitute. There's no way to prove yourself out of a rat's nest of class hierarchies and control structures.