alt Hacker NewsI'd like to believe I have an inkling, having done a fair bit of teaching.
Still, imagine how hard other skills are to acquire. How much civil engineering can you learn in two weeks? How much violin playing? But you could absolutely get basic grasps on a general purpose programming language. With something specialized like Unity or Excel you would get tons of useful output.
The hurdle around assignment operator is as old as symbolic languages. That's why legends such as Niklaus Wirth wanted to use another operator, ":=", a notation that is still being used.
Anyway, it can be a hurdle, but one I find that most people get over pretty quickly.
> The hurdle around assignment operator is as old as symbolic languages. That's why legends such as Niklaus Wirth wanted to use another operator, ":=", a notation that is still being used.
Well, sure; but more generally, the ability to accept other meanings for symbols (and keep subtly different symbols straight in one's head) is a mental skill, and individuals vary in their aptitude for it. (Presumably, this one is also relevant to natural language learning, since one must reckon e.g. with false cognates.)