I think algorithm design <i>is</i> hard. Most students&#x2F;people can&#x27;t break down a problem into small enough steps for the computer to do them.<p>Are you familiar with the concept of &quot;chunking&quot; in memory research? Well, computers don&#x27;t chunk but humans do. Humans tend to think about their algorithms in terms of the chunks they already know, but for computers sometimes each chunk has to be broken down into much smaller sub-steps.<p>And that&#x27;s non-intuitive and hard. When explaining stuff to a human you get immediate non-verbal or sometimes verbal feedback if they don&#x27;t understand the chunks, but computers just give a syntax error.<p>SECONDLY. Students have trouble making an accurate mental model of what the computer is doing at each step, so they can&#x27;t trace through the code, much less create new code.<p>Those are the two biggies, in my experience.