Most people who teach programming believe that an aptitude for programming is closely related to an aptitude for mathematics. As a result, we have developed a structure for our curricula which uses mathematics almost exclusively as a base. Recently, however, individuals have begun to claim that programming skill is associated with language aptitude. This, in turn, has caused some to reflect on the relative merits of the two philosophies. In that spirit, this study was undertaken to assess the relative roles of mathematical aptitude and language aptitude in the development and enhancement of programming skill. It was found that both types of aptitudes are associated with programming skill: mathematical aptitude was associated with an ability to learn rules of logic and language aptitude was associated with an ability to team syntatic rules. Implications for the teaching of programming are discussed.