He appears to answer a slightly different question to the one that was asked, but I agree with what he said in his answer. To be a really good programmer, you need to have a particular kind of brain, and if you do, you will pick everything up very quickly. If you don't, you will always have a weak grasp of some concepts no matter how much you are taught.
There are university lecturers who agree that it's clear within the first couple of weeks whether someone has the aptitude to study CS. I remember a paper that was talked about a few years ago that described a "double hump" in aptitude, clearly separating the two groups. They wrote a very short test that was a good predictor of success. There's an article on Coding Horror about it: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...
There are university lecturers who agree that it's clear within the first couple of weeks whether someone has the aptitude to study CS. I remember a paper that was talked about a few years ago that described a "double hump" in aptitude, clearly separating the two groups. They wrote a very short test that was a good predictor of success. There's an article on Coding Horror about it: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...