Personally I'm of the opinion that a lot of programming learning difficulties come from the teachers and methodology of teaching programming.
Though it's all antidotal from
Going through different college courses that teach both programming and contactor/ladder logic. The programming classes had something like 40% learn rates, while the ladder logic classes everyone eventually got it. And with chances of going out to the field utterly normal people have been able change our contactor/ladder logic to make things work and/or fix issues.
College doesn't really teach programming. They teach computer science. Professor largely expect you to pick up programming on your own to solve the problems given.
At the upper-division level (years 3/4) this is true, but my college certainly teaches programming and syntax in Python/C++ along with computer science concepts your first two years.
Most CS curricula should definitely not be focusing on any one language, no matter what the year. A typical first few courses are something like:
1) intro to computer science. This is typically teach entry level program flow techniques, loops, if/else, recursion, some OO. My school used java but the focus was not on the language.
2) Data Structures and Algorithms. Overview of your typical data structures and common operations. Gets in to big O, etc. My school accepted assignments in both java and c++, but didn't emphasize either one.
3) Architecture. This is low level CPU architecture. Pipelines, caches etc. We used some sort of assembly for assignments.
4) programming paradigms. This was basically SICP. Meta circular evaluators, etc. We used scheme for assignments but again no real emphasis on the language.
5) OSes. Basics of operating systems. Threads, memory management, networking etc. Assignments were in C.
I think this is the standard CS curriculum, at least according to my experiences and most of the people I've worked with with CS degrees.
From the post you responded to: "...along with computer science concepts your first two years."
Reducesuffering simply stated that some programming tools were taught in the first years of college and he or she did not say his curriculum excluded any of the topics in your list.
Though it's all antidotal from Going through different college courses that teach both programming and contactor/ladder logic. The programming classes had something like 40% learn rates, while the ladder logic classes everyone eventually got it. And with chances of going out to the field utterly normal people have been able change our contactor/ladder logic to make things work and/or fix issues.