Personally I've always considered a solid grasp of algebra to be the minimum bar for being able to program, at least for anything that isn't utterly trivial. Being able to take a word problem and turn it into a system of equations and solve it is a pretty close analog to being able to take some sort of problem or business requirement and turn it into code.
And the sad truth is that a huge percentage of the population struggle with just arithmetic, let alone algebra.
Personally I've always considered a solid grasp of algebra to be the minimum bar for being able to program, at least for anything that isn't utterly trivial. Being able to take a word problem and turn it into a system of equations and solve it is a pretty close analog to being able to take some sort of problem or business requirement and turn it into code.
And the sad truth is that a huge percentage of the population struggle with just arithmetic, let alone algebra.