It sounds like the guy means well, but most people don’t have the cognitive tools required to do “programming” with any degree of usefulness.
That often goes unmentioned in public debate. The polite assumption we’re supposed to make is that “anyone can do anything” if they “work hard” or “put their mind to it.”
That’s simply wrong, though. You run into cognitive limits, and that’s that. We recognize this on the margins - we don’t really believe that “anyone can be a mathematician” - it is seen as something that takes a lot of brainpower that many people lack.
But we refuse to look further down the scale at tasks that don’t take as much raw intelligence as abstract math, but which still DO take more than a lot of people have.
Well, said.