As Cimpian and others have studied re: our beliefs about innate ability, constantly repeating the frame of innate ability even when arguing about it makes these beliefs feel commonplace and reasonable. Take a note of just how much airtime, how many features in blogs, how many times work like this gets amplified while work with millions of learners and global populations and far more careful interrogation of achievement evidence never does.
The "programming ability" stuff has a waiting audience
Studying computer science education as if it is a phenomenon that we discovered growing on our shoreline instead of a goddamn field that we are constructing every moment. JFC. Abundant evidence continues to emerge that says how we teach computing is extremely broken. Students' failures in the context of a failing educational experience are not some kind of untroubled measure of ability.
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