Somewhere around 2004-2006 I read a blog post / article that I have been unable to find since that was supposed to be from a CS professor at a relatively prestigious university where they had done a study on entering classes for a number of years, at the beginning of the class they gave some very rudimentary problems focused on if you could handle arbitrary rules - those that could ended up passing at a significant rate those who couldn't ended up failing at a significant rate.

The theory was that programming has many arbitrary rules that you need to be aware of work your way around to make things work, why is the language construct like this instead of this other way etc.

The law in many ways is logical but it is an arbitrary logic.

Are you thinking of the research by Richard Bornat and his student Saeed Dehnadi?

It may be the reason it’s hard to find now is that Bornat later retracted it, blaming his struggles with mental health. [0]

0. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

hmm, ok. I think I might have heard that as well one time but I forgot, probably less interesting to me than the first idea.

I think it is that, although it doesn't match exactly what I remember either.

I wonder what Saeed Dehnadi says about it though.

Sounds similar to this blog post by the founder of SO

https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...