rogramming courses?

Dear /puddi/,

Why or why do so many people fail to learn programming?
Is it because they fail to see programming as calculation of data and instead see a black box that magically does things?

Or is it because they can't grasp the "strict" typing of a programming language?

What is it, /prog/, that makes programming so hard, even the introductory course seems so hard for people, even with languages like LISP or Python, and books like SICP?

Just love how /prog/ completely ignores actual discussion and talks about stupid shit like mild grammar.

[quote]Mathematics, on the other hand, can't be understood at all. Try understand infinite or at least finite sets. How come, set's elements are "unordered"? Does such condition possible in real life? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?[/quote]

Set elements are unordered because it let's us talk about more things with the same concept.  A set really just has a way of doing some basic things:

Add shit
Union sets
Intersect sets
Remove SOME element

Now think about a list.  You can:

Add shit to the front or back
Concatenate two lists
Intersect two lists (warning:  may require thinking!)
Remove shit from the front or back

Now think about a BST.  You can:

Add shit in a magic ordering
Union two trees (warning:  may require thinking!)
Intersect two trees (warning:  may require thinking!)
Remove shit

Sets are just a generalized model that can talk about several things at once.  Order just allows us to specify even more detail about the contents of a set.  Of course order requires you to first ask "What is order?" which may be answered by "Why do I care about order?"  Usually we just need a mapping from our set to the natural numbers or integers (whichever is more convenient).  Sometimes we need to have a larger set, like the reals.

Also, as for infinite stuff, it's more about talking about generalized models that help us think about things abstractly without getting worried about the specific details.  If the universe turns out to be quantized, then we don't need the reals.  Will we still use real analysis aka freshman calculus?  Hell yes.  It's convenient as hell.  Would you talk about a software project by talking about every specific asterisk, ampersand, and semicolon?  No!  You talk about class organization and really useful general design patterns.

Math is just a tool here.  And by thinking about weird stuff like the power set of the naturals we can then add specific details to model useful stuff.

Though honestly some of the stuff is pointless.  Like category theory.  A fucking sandwich fits into that stuff.