Programmers have spent countless hours practising programming to the point where they have forgotten how difficult it was in the beginning. A non programmer might think of programming as "memorizing hundreds of rules" to get anything done, but one doesn't learn programming by sitting around explicitly memorizing hundreds of rules and then begin to program.
Actually writing programs with a minimal set of 'rules' memorized and then adding more as needed is how one typically learns programming.
I've been teaching programming for five or six years now. I always start with HTML, then add CSS, and then add JavaScript. That way they experience mastery all the way, and see how they can be creative with the code. It's so great to see a pupil "get it" -- and sometimes even pupils that "suck at math" or even pupils who have problems spelling the most basic sentence correctly. In fact I've found that there's a strange correlation where pupils who have dyslexia often seem to be better than others at programming.
Programmers have spent countless hours practising programming to the point where they have forgotten how difficult it was in the beginning. A non programmer might think of programming as "memorizing hundreds of rules" to get anything done, but one doesn't learn programming by sitting around explicitly memorizing hundreds of rules and then begin to program.
Actually writing programs with a minimal set of 'rules' memorized and then adding more as needed is how one typically learns programming.