While certainly a combination of nature and nurture, there's little question natural born programmers exist. I am one. At 4th grade Dad brought home a terminal and had me type in a 3 line BASIC program (printed a sine wave). I was instantly hooked, programmed daily, and some 35 years later I'm still lovin' it. That nature had to be nurtured lest it be starved or destroyed, and given room and care to flourish it did.
Sounds very similar to how an entire generation got started with programming.
Whatever cause you attribute to your interest, I find it more reasonable to believe that you found the concept of having a computer render your input on a screen to be fascinating and that it led you to teach yourself and practice further how to do this, or a multitude of reasons, but not that you had some inherent predisposition to being a programmer.
I don't see how it's not indicative of some inherent predisposition thereto. I realize the prior post was brief and may not have gotten the point across fully; point is, most choices I made revolved around programming, it's what I did (and do) for fun, it's how I view the world.
That an entire generation got started the same way may very well be indicative of "inherent predisposition": that period made it easy for the predisposed youth to reach the leading edge of technology very fast and keep pace for a very long time. This in contrast with the current generation, whom I often worry find it nigh unto impossible to "begin at the beginning", there being such a vast swath of complexity between individual transistor and, say, Skyrim: the nature may be there, but nurturing it is much more difficult.
Ok, so how should I phrase it? I grok most programming concepts immediately. When about to take my AP test in programming, my brother realized I was completely lacking in knowledge about pointers, spent a couple hours going over linked lists etc, and the next day aced the test - which was mostly about pointers.
I don't know what verbiage would constitute "demonstrate innate ability" to you. I thought what I wrote did.
