That's some food for thought. My issue with programming courses is they ask you to memorize the commands then use them; most programming is about creating the logic then QA'ing with some data. Excel is data-first and becomes more like a game, trying different approaches with a clear picture of the end in mind. It's easier to persevere.
Quite true, and too often developers are not aware of how important data-first is for their own work in the exploratory part of programming.
Programmers have powerful interactive shells and debug environments, yet most courses center the teaching and communication of how a program works around the concepts in the finished product (a working program), more than how you arrive piecewise to the full solution by iterating small parts of the concepts in the domain problem and finding the correct parts of code to handle them.
