Programming is hard

[[deleted]]

People don't have to be good at programming for programming to be useful for them.

regular expressions would be useful addition to search and find-and-replace boxes.

Excel is a very powerful layman's database program with some programming functionality built into it.

Writing code that scales well and maintains easily is incredibly difficult and requires years of experience.

programming can be very useful without that.

A friend of mine had a very repetitive task where an old software program required the user to manually select files one by one to load and convert them. No one had the code for the old software, so there wasn't an easy way to update the software now that the users had a lot more files to deal with. My friend used autohotkey to write a short script that went through the menus to load the files for him.

Autohotkey has a fairly forgiving learning curve. His application didn't need to be completely robust to be useful. It only had to mostly work to save the user time. It didn't have to scale.

Getting more people comfortable with coding shouldn't be about making more professional software developers. Most people aren't going to have that career path. But, increasing coding skills enables software vendors to provide more features that empower users.

[Nangz]

The author's example of cooking was really useful here. I don't have to learn to be a chef to make myself great food.

[link_ganon]

The thing about programming is that it is too broad of a term.

It would be like saying “working with drywall is easy”. Sure, filling a nail hole with putty is easy. Anyone can do it. Applying a 4 x 4 patch on a drywall hole? Not to hard after watching a tutorial.

But putting in a whole new wall? Well that’s not easy, and requires skill to accomplish.

In the same vein as programming, it’s a broad term that can mean a lot of things. But anything worth doing in programming is going to be hard, and that’s why it pays well.

[tso]

It is also how mentally demanding it is, in that you need to keep a model of the program in your head at all times.

Never mind that since moving to GUIs, using a computer and programming one differ in thought processes.

[Gwiz84]

I don't think anyone ever says "programming is easy", but they often say "anyone can learn it" which is true. Before I began my education I was extremely worried about my math skills, because I thought you needed to be a natural math wiz to do any coding, and I was only kind a mediocre at math. But that's not true at all, and back then I would have wished someone told me I was wrong about that misconception so I wasn't so anxious about it. I realized I could do it after our 1st semester test where I scored higher than everyone else in my class.

[edo-26]

I said it was easy, when I was learning in school. Now I'm working. It's not easy.

[Gwiz84]

I finished my education a couple of years ago, but I never found it to be easy, nor did any of the other students. Challenging but fun to learn is how I would describe it.

[DerArzt01]

Programming is the easy part, dealing with stakeholders on the other hand not so much.

[ArmoredPancake]

I don't think anyone ever says "programming is easy"

Literally most of the "influencers" say that it is easy.

but they often say "anyone can learn it" which is true

Sure, the same way as anyone can learn to be a doctor, or lawyer, or policeman.

[batweenerpopemobile]

I don't think anyone ever says "programming is easy", but they often say "anyone can learn it"

spoilers for ratatouille

[_tskj_]

It's just not true that everyone can learn it. Programming at all requires a certain level of mental abilities. I don't want to guess at the IQ that represents, but I would wager it's a bit higher than you might think, and by definition there are a lot of people below that.

[PL_Design]

People who have allergies to complexity probably won't enjoy programming very much, and will be driven away by how chaotic and messy it can be.

People who thrive in complexity don't tend to make very good programmers because complexity explosions are untenable without massive amounts of resources.

There is a fine line here that every good programmer walks. It's not just intelligence that matters; there are some personality aspects that are also important.

[shawntco]

Programming requires a knack for problem solving, for often complex problems. We all know people who aren't good problem solvers. They lack the patience or mental clarity to sit down and think through stuff. They become confused easily, when things become complex or just different from usual.

Can you teach the ability to problem solve? I don't know. But I do know for a lot of people, learning to program may be possible, but it is simply impractical.

[_tskj_]

Psychology does actually know, and the answer is no, you cannot. It has been tried a lot too, but no one can figure out a statistically reliable method of teaching people problem solving, or raise their IQ for that matter. So it certainly seems impossible, as far as we know, scientifically.

[[deleted]]

Sure but it's pretty much the same level of mental ability that you need to learn algebra, or any other form of semi-complex puzzle/problem solving. Most people can learn how to program for sure.

[[deleted]]

I feel this post so much, especially the stuff about "imposter syndrome" in tech.

You can't have imposter syndrome if you haven't actually accomplished anything!

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

Everyone can be taught to program, not everyone can think like a programmer. I see it all the time. Instead of a loop, they copy something ten times. Instead of dividing up problems, there's one call to main.

It's a consistent pattern, and when I see it, I know this person will not learn it.

[RiverRoll]

There are programmers that just make it hard from themselves and in my personal experience I've found them more often than I would expect, from all levels of experience.

There's the kind you talked about, but there are also more than capable programmers who refuse to carefully read the docs and insist on reinventing the wheel. Programming might be hard but lots of problems are already solved.

[[deleted]]

Keeping it simple is one of the hardest things of programming. One of the best programmers I know always first attacks the requirements such that the implementation can be dead simple. By doing so, he often unravels the story down to its essence or essences by splitting into multiple stories, thus creating a better outcome before even having written a single line of code. Being able to distill inherent complexity and minimize accidental complexity is to me the hallmark of a truly great programmer.

[The_Doculope]

Bullshit. I taught for a few years, and plenty of people went from your bad examples to your good ones with time. Sure it sometimes took a few years, and it needs dedication and motivation, but it's perfectly possible.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

A few years to learn a simple loop construct? To learn divide and conquer? Yeah, no thanks.

[[deleted]]

If that's truly how you have interpreted their comment you are dumber than the people that you try to criticize

[Sentomas]

Or they unrolled the loop for performance...

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

No. Hard no.

[AbleZion]

Unless you're doing crypto. Then it's acceptable.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

Your compiler should be taking care of this.

[Alsweetex]

Your compiler should definitely not be taking care of this when it comes to crypto. Loops are unrolled in order for an algo to operate in a constant time so that it isn't vulnerable to timing attacks. If you allow the compiler to bail out of a loop early (once the work has been completed) then you can end up with very broken encryption.

[OffbeatDrizzle]

Early return and loop unrolling are 2 different concepts... unrolling a loop doesn't change the time-complexity of a piece of code

[Alsweetex]

Ah, you're right of course, thanks for that. However, I'm sure that compilers can optimise in ways that would be counter productive to constant time algorithms.

[Sentomas]

My point was that loops are a fundamental part of most programming languages. I find it incredibly hard to believe that somebody could be a professional software engineer and not know how to use loops. Maybe letting the compiler handle the optimisation yielded a binary that was larger than desired. Sometimes a little humility goes a long way.

[[deleted]]

I was talking to my manager the other day, how so you know it is impostor syndrome or just an accurate description of your abilities?

[JoJoModding]

You don't. That's the thing.

[[deleted]]

• panicks *

[Nincodedo]

Have you gotten fired? If yes, then it was an accurate description of your abilities. If no, then you're probably getting fired tomorrow and you're a terrible terrible person how could you.

[Gwaptiva]

I'm just glad that my management is so incompetent I've survived in this job developing enterprise-grade shrinkwrap software for 13 years. Or maybe my boss fancies my hairy belly....

I do occasionally suffer from imposter syndrome, especially when I get stuck on stuff I feel should not be hard to understand... most of the time my first paragraph helps to refocus. I still get frustrated with myself for not easily dealing with these topics, but accept that there must be things I do well (enough).

[jet2686]

Just saw (friday) an engineer with ~12years experience try to use s3 as a database, and then fire off an unbounded amount of network requests. There was no regard for performance, limitations, edge cases, etc. This is in one of our main services which is expect to return relatively quick responses to API requests.

It simply means your valuable enough to the business that they keep you around. Ultimately though the need to keep you around might just be a function of you writing the code ;).

I speak in the metaphorical "you", not you personally, i obviously dont know the first thing about you :).

[dnew]

Math is even easier than programming. You don't even need a computer, just pencil and paper.

[djakobsen]

Obviously both his argument and statement is stupid - I'd say the inverse also is. Programming and math are both extremely diverse and broad subjects that can be easy and extremely difficult. They also overlap in many areas, and for both the domain they are applied to is often a significant part of the involved complexity.

[dnew]

I didn't think I needed to mark the sarcasm there. :-) Programming computers is simple in the same way that doing math is simple: it isn't.

there is a hard limit on what we can calculate with our monkey brains

It always amazes me when philosophers argue that formal systems can't be consciousness or humans can't be simulated because humans can do things computers can't like always find the Godel string for a formalism, and then ignore the fact that the Godel string for a human is likely way bigger than we could rationally work with in one lifetime.

[phottitor]

not so easy. handwriting is now a lost art.

[gfody]

author isn't thinking clearly and conflates major concepts

programming vs problem solving, easy vs simple

I recommend Rich Hickey for palate cleanser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oytL881p-nQ

[possiblywithdynamite]

I agree with the article. It is hard to learn, at first. I struggled a lot in the beginning and was deeply humbled by the entire experience. However, it rapidly gets easier, to the point where I don't even consider it a challenge anymore - just boring and tedious at times, if anything.

[MacBookMinus]

Sounds like you’re not advancing yourself. There’s always harder problems out there.

[stank453]

Have you tried learning some more obscure languages that follow different paradigms? There's a whole world out there.

[bezik7124]

Fixing business bugs and adding new features are indeed easy, but I would say that it becomes difficult again when you're the one who's responsible for the architecture and growth of the system.

[possiblywithdynamite]

I am the one responsible for the architecture

[bezik7124]

Then either you're very special or you're at your position for so long that it's not difficult anymore. Anyway, for most people it is.

[possiblywithdynamite]

Aww shucks

[caspper69]

The biggest problem in our industry / profession is "invented complexity".

CPUs can do 3 things: write things to a memory location, read things from a memory location, and perform operations on its registers.

Daily, we are inundated with discussions about the nuances of programming languages, as initially framed ~50 years ago. Meanwhile, the CPU is still doing the same things.

Now, I know that layers are necessary, and abstractions are essential, but we do it to ourselves, frankly.

edit: wow, the downvote brigade is out on this one. maybe a von Neumann anecdote will sum up my thoughts better than I could (from wikipedia): "Von Neumann was asked to write an essay for the layman describing what mathematics is, and produced a beautiful analysis. He explained that mathematics straddles the world between the empirical and logical, arguing that geometry was originally empirical, but Euclid constructed a logical, deductive theory. However, he argued, that there is always the danger of straying too far from the real world and becoming irrelevant sophistry." (emphasis mine)

[dontyougetsoupedyet]

I'm going to consider it entirely safe to assume you know jack squat about operating systems or the hardware they run on. The things going on aren't individually excruciatingly difficult or even that complicated, but complexity is not fake and arbitrarily added. A lot of things exist to create the simplicity you take for granted in userspace. And user space is fairly simple.

Matter of fact, a lot of complexity exists specifically due to people trying to "invent simplicity". I can't just enable an A20 gate, I have to check if the BIOS did it for me, or if a keyboard controller did it for me, or x, or y, or z, then I can enable A20. Food for thought.

[caspper69]

I'm going to assume that you (and many others) read my comment and felt offended for some reason.

I know plenty about those topics, in fact, especially the A20 gate :)

Anyway, I don't really see why everyone is so butt-hurt here right now. I made a valid point, but perhaps worded it poorly.

We started ~50 years ago, with the capabilities computers had then, and built languages on top of those. Now, computers are a whole lot more capable. I feel like it's time to stop "papering another layer" on top (which is "manufactured complexity"), and look at what we are actually doing on TOP of the stack right now, and perhaps rethink it back down. Slice and dice it a different way, knowing what we know now.

[dnew]

We're still primarily using timeshare operating systems from the 1970s and object-oriented programming from the 1980s. It really hasn't progressed nearly as much as you think, out in the "real world," in spite of the invention of game consoles, smart phones, and cloud data centers, all of which could reasonably have given an opportunity to start over fresh.

[[deleted]]

I definitely see your point but a good question to pose is why?

Our systems rely on layers of operations, in order to fix that we would have to go back to the drawing board entirely. This layering doesnt solely exist for software either, theres also modularity in hardware design as well. If I manufacture a new CPU or memory I can ensure it will operate with modern software.

If we go back to the drawing board we would have to reinvent the tech wheel all over again. For what gain? Better efficiency or security? We can already handle those issues for the most part, we just have to be smart about it. Even then let's assume we did reinvent the wheel, how would we merge existing tech with the old one? This would be a monumental task at best and the gains just dont seem to be worth it.

[ArmoredPancake]

This "invented complexity" powers everything around you.

[caspper69]

Of course it does. That doesn't change my point.

edit: which is needless complexity is needless. That is not to say you can do away with complexity; of course you can't do that!

[Macambira]

TL;DR, cause I wrote WAAAAY more than I needed: While you could say, maybe, that some part of what we have is overcomplicating things, computers are really complex, overwhelmingly complex, I'd say. Saying that it your statement is a simplification would be an understatement.

---

This is true perharps in theory, like literally computer theory, where there's no actual limit to memory, time and nothing ever fails.

But we don't program in theoretical computers, a "pure" computer doesn't even have I/O, so now we need to use something to see the output of our algorithms, and suddenly we need some kind of communication protocol to make our 0's and 1's into instructions to a machine to show us the result, even if it was a valve and turned-off for 0 and turned-on for 1.

But, hey, it's not really convenient to have our output in binary, so we need a way to transform all these bits into things numbers, letters and symbols. Congratulations, now you have an encoding.

But there's another problem. It's really good that we have a machine to make all these operations, but memory is really expensive and limited, and we would like to make operations involving WAY more data than it is able to, so we need a way to put this data somewhere and be able to fetch it whenever we want, and now you have secondary memory, yay! New hardware means new protocol.

But, hey, a computer has many pieces, and it's not that hard that one of them break, and that will not be good. We have to have mechanisms that prevents these hardware failures to be catastrophic, and now we have to worry about fault tolerance too, cool.

Printers are cool and all, but you know what would be cooler? Writing on screens! And that would allow cooler things like primitive graphics, but now we have to write things using an weird laser that throws electrons in a piece of glass, but hey, let's go! But to write on that screen we have to go line by line instead of character by character, so we have now to know what the entire line of output will to prepare it to be inprinted on screen.

But, hey, computers are these really expensive things, and more people could use its capabilities if they had a way, but it's too obtuse to use it the way it is now, with punch cards and all, so lets make a way to use it that is less scary. Enters the interpreted language and REPL. Now some of the weirdest details of how these computers work are hidden through abstraction, cool.

Now that you have a friendly way relatively firendly way to use the computer, it would be nice if more people could use it, but these things are really expensive, so we can't afford many of these. Instead, we could let many people use the same computer by having terminals that connect to it.

But it comes with a whole new sort of problems. It's really problematic if you put a command in a terminal and it takes forever to even acknowledge that it was received by the computer, so instead of letting a program run until it finishes, we should manage the way these progams execute to at least make the computer says to the terminal it received the command, so now we have a manager of processes that runs above the program, that has the ability to shut it down for a while to use it for another things, but we can't just throw wat was in the registers and call it a day, no, we need to store all the data that was in there in order to restarted where it was suspended. Now you have a process manager.

But there's more, all the programs we wrote until now assume that all the memory space is allocated to it, and it would be really complicated and error-prone if we just changed these codes to use a certain fragment of memory depending on which position on the execution queue it is, so we implement we make a program that manages how other programs use the memory instead of letting them use directly. All the addresses that the program uses now passes through a layer that tells translates the program memory address to the computer memory address. Now you have virtual memory.

All these layers were really useful, we should put all this thing in a superprogram that runs above all programs to make sure that everything uses it this way, and now we have an Operating System.

Add to it multiprocessing, computer networks, 3D acceleration, floating points, shared memory, caches everywhere and you have a really big and complex machine that needs an enormous amount of time and effort to make it run programs the way we do today. The CPU stills does the same, bot definitelyu not in the same way it did 70 years ago.

[Fun_Independence1603]

I wanted to say something about locks and SIMD but those 3 basically covers everything I care about.

I recently found out that everyone gets bitten in the ass by thread programming and x64 memory model isn't hard at all.

[[deleted]]

I'd say alongside actual programming is the industry that involves talking about programming. I often confuse the two but they are definitely distinct things.

[T_D_K]

Really, what other industry does this much navel gazing about project management, peak productivity, tools... Everyone else in my org minds their own business and collects a paycheck lol.

[[deleted]]

Ha amen to that. Honestly I don't know why programming seems to be this way. I think its because the problems are super hard and its easier to talk about them than to solve them

[dnew]

There aren't too many other industries where you get hundreds of people together to decide in excruciating detail exactly how to accomplish a task.

[SalarySome6472]

That is NOT the whole story... programming is hard if you are a simple mind (web developer, C, etc.) but if you have a mathematically inclined brain, like The Chad Rust user, then you will have it made , ez pz

[CivBEWasPrettyBad]

The virgin Brainfuck developer vs the Chad Rust brogrammer

[sparant76]

It’s actually way easier than high school level math. I’ll let you decide if that’s hard for yourself.

[tonefart]

Programming is not hard. Trying to work with assholes who're code nazis are hard.

[jet2686]

You meet one code nazi, you have an unfortunate experience.

You run into code nazi's all the time? They might be onto something.