Learning math isn't "really, really hard", but it is unforgiving in a particular kind of way: you're basically required to internalize a concept fully before going on to later concepts. (This is coming from being mostly self-taught up through calculus-level math)
Students often don't fully grasp one concept before the teacher moves onto the next topic. Once this happens, the student is missing a crucial building block and tends to just get stuck with all the later things that build on it. This is a common experience in schools and I suspect is the origin of the "math is hard" trope.
It can be hard for a student to self-evaluate whether he/she has full mastery of a topic. This is exacerbated by situations where a struggling student will go to office hours or work with classmates and "solve" a problem, without having acquired the skills to solve slightly different permutations of that same problem on their own.
In programming, we don't have this problem. You can write HelloWorld without understanding console IO, terminal protocols, window buffers. You can write a webapp without knowing the OSI stack. Software is built upon abstractions.
Students often don't fully grasp one concept before the teacher moves onto the next topic. Once this happens, the student is missing a crucial building block and tends to just get stuck with all the later things that build on it. This is a common experience in schools and I suspect is the origin of the "math is hard" trope.
It can be hard for a student to self-evaluate whether he/she has full mastery of a topic. This is exacerbated by situations where a struggling student will go to office hours or work with classmates and "solve" a problem, without having acquired the skills to solve slightly different permutations of that same problem on their own.
In programming, we don't have this problem. You can write HelloWorld without understanding console IO, terminal protocols, window buffers. You can write a webapp without knowing the OSI stack. Software is built upon abstractions.