Sure, not everyone is cut out for programming. But there's still a fair amount of incidential complexity we can eliminate, which will make programming more approachable to more of the people who would be good at it.
Lockharts Lament (https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....) applies equally well to programming. People in general are smarter and more adaptable than HN seems to believe. The real obstacles to more widespread programming are a) showing people that it can make their lives easier and b) smoothing the learning curve so that it provides rewards before their patience runs out. We know this because many people do build amazingly complex systems with Excel and Access and VB6. They are clearly capable of computational thinking. They just don't have the time or inclination to invest thousands of hours into learning bash/emacs/python/js/html/css before seeing any results.
