Originally posted by AsianInvasion
He's being silly.
Depending on what programming language you choose to learn, it'll vary in difficulty. If you were to learn Assembly right off the bat, then you'd probably struggle quite a bit. However, if you were to start with a programming language like Visual Basic .NET (in which case you'll need an edition of Visual Studio Express that is compatible with VB.NET - such as Visual Studio/Basic 2010), you'd have a much easier time.
Much of programming is not particularly complex, it may take a little while to get the basics down, but once you have completed that, you'll understand how to create basic programs. Its really the higher level ideas, and large application development, that take some time, both to learn and to create.
As there are many languages, its impossible to tell you exactly what software you will need. Beyond that, there are many different options for software. Take the language C++ for example, there are a variety of IDEs (integrated development environments) and compilers (used to turn the source code into an obj file) and linkers (used to turn the obj file into an executable).
It mainly depends on your teacher and simply how your brain works as to whether programming will come easily to you, but know this, many people say it takes 10+ years to truly become skilled at programming.
Photographic memory helps.