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Notes -
A few thoughts:
I learned programming I think by something closer to the first intuitive method, and it's still how I generally encourage people to learn. I would describe it as, first write a program that does something you find interesting or useful, no matter how minor. Pay little attention to design, cleanliness, optimization etc, just bang it out and get it working. Once you have something that basically works, then work on refactoring and adjustment to make it better, possibly with the advice and supervision of somebody more senior. Expand that initial project to be bigger and do more things, or start a new project that's more ambitious, and repeat. Keep at it for a while and eventually you'll learn all of the important parts and gain experience.
I see this as useful in that it maximizes natural interest. I find it rare and difficult to build interest in reading walls of text about elaborate rule systems regarding things you've never done. Both building things you find interesting or useful and getting hands-on experience in how to make it better are much easier to maintain interest in and stick with.
I do think that there's a certain type of intelligence or way of thinking necessary to be a good programmer. It's probably kind of correlated with proper IQ, though not quite the same thing. Like many other related things, I have no idea to what extent it's genetic versus developmental, but clearly many adults just aren't capable of it.
Regarding gender, I'm not really sure why, but it seems women self-select out of development at a very high rate, most specifically American women. Of all of the developers at my company, I think under 10% are women. Women are a lot more common in testing, product reps, project managers, line management, pretty much everything but development. There's zero women in our architecture groups. I'm not honestly sure if women are actually less likely to want to advance into the higher ranks of technical skill, or if it's actually about the same for the total number of women doing development work. I've never personally worked with a woman I thought was a super awesome developer, though some other people I would trust to make such calls have made such claims of some of the other women I work with, and I'd also say not that many of the men were super awesome either.
I haven't seen any reason to adjust my priors on that beyond the 90s-era standard - anyone who has the skills and the interest is welcome to do the job, but I reject the notion that there's any significant overall bias or prejudice keeping deserving people out of the profession, or that we need to put our fingers on the scales in some way to get "better numbers" on the participation of any particular group.
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