Hacker News Reader

Here's a good comment from a reader, which I think addresses a misunderstanding behind this article about what programming actually is:

> The thing that takes time is humans understanding what they want. Programmers are like therapists who help them crystalize their thoughts to the point where they are at least vaguely consistent. The program is just a representation of that idea.

View on HN

Yet the widely recognized most effective way to crystallize the idea, is not via therapy but through rounds of prototyping. Now only if prototyping is as easy as snap a finger.

Coding automation too will help to make better software.

What programmers have done is to translate human ideas into machine understandable symbols, or graphic layout. Not he latter is probably far more difficult than the former which itself can be as hard as NLP and essentially the goal of the almost entire computer language evolution, to improve the effectiveness of translations human ideas to computer understandable symbols.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com