I'm not so sure about that. One big conceptual hurdle that many beginners have is the notion that a program is a sequential sequence of steps, and at any point in time during a program's execution, there is a unique "current statement" [1] and "current state" (content of variables).

Single stepping through your program with a good visual debugger makes these concepts very clear.

[1] Of course this is not true for multi-threaded programs, but multi-threaded programs are well out of "beginner" territory.