> If the best we've got for convincing people to learn to code is that it's like math notation (the most hated part of math [...]

That's funny. I've told a mathy friend that I've sometimes wondered if I could have grown up without the whole, "... except I suck at math", and I think that's why.

I don't struggle with the problem solving. I've watched people reinvent chunks of "difficult" math in code without realizing or caring that they've done it.

I've started to think that math might actually be awful on purpose.