Comment by npteljes
Pascal also had := for assignment, if I remember correctly. I disliked it, to be honest, = is pretty much universally accepted in the IT world to mean "assign to".
I don't think this is something that keeps someone from programming. If it does, then the other 100000 hoops won't be better, every trade has its "why the fuck is this the way it is" moments.
If you'd still try programming with her, I think you could start with a visual programming thing. Maze from Blockly Games is a simple online logic game that can be overcome with visual programming. No need to register or anything. The levels get progressively harder, as it teaches to apply programming concepts, and makes the player combine them. As a programmer, I found the game really fun, and I think it's suitable for beginners as well, seeing how for example LEGO used a very similar system for its programmable sets.
> I don't think this is something that keeps someone from programming.
Not everybody is wired the same way. That exact thing happened to me, it was some kind of mental block. And when that fell away I found the rest of programming to be fairly easy.