Eh, my experience suggests otherwise. I've taught Python to high schoolers and adults in an afternoon. Were they doing anything terribly interesting? Not really, but they were making their own programs. They still had a lot to learn, mind you, but they did learn to program.
Do you think they would've been able to independently solve a problem/design a program after just one session? Genuinely curious. I've had limited experience teaching people to program, but my experience has been that people teach themselves to program and you can only really be a resource for them. You can teach syntax easily but design and problem solving seem impossible to transfer; you can make the process easier but they have to teach it to themselves.
Addendum: I'm currently volunteering with a project teaching middle school children to program, and I am impressed by how much they're able to accomplish after a single lesson. I'm not sure they're independently designing programs or solving problems, but they're definitely independently exploring the space adjacent to the example programs by experimenting, and they're making sense of the results and learning. It helps that this is a graphical/block environment where they're able to discover syntax and keywords on their own, and ingest the program output as cool patterns/behaviors.
