"With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess and an expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became, like their mentors, vessels of the mysterious, ineffable expertise."

I think a lot of programmers here learned programming the same way too. Sitting in front of a compiler/interpreter, edit the code, try to compile and run the program. We will get a "yes or no", and if no, we repeat the procedure. Today, we can program without thinking consciously "will this code compile"; We just write it and a lot of the time, it compiles just fine. If we were to teach someone having trouble with programming however, the most useful advice we have is usually "You just need to spend more time with it".