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Comment by mobiuscog | Hacker News Reader

Programming sucks if you're not interested in programming.

I agree. I haven't read the article, but the first thing that came to my mind was: "it doesn't suck". Rather, I find it a fun activity.

There's so much creativity one can put into programming. Especially when programming for oneself and not for Super Evil MegaCorp (not the actual game dev company [0]!). Sometimes it feels to me like art, for example when creating games.

My older brother, at some point in his live, he thought programming sucked as well. But then he stopped doing programming professionally and now just as a hobby and it became fun for him once again.

I will read the article later today :)

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[0]: http://www.superevilmegacorp.com

Regarding programming as art, I like the quote from Fred Brooks comparing it to poetry:

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of imagination ... yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself"

That's one of the reasons why I still love programming (after programming professionally for almost 25 years): http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/

According to the author programming sucks for the following reasons:

* costs and time, difficult to maintain

* difficult to hire developers, difficult to learn

* no diversity in industry

* users have no influence on product

Well, yes. Software is a labour intensive task. But given the number of jobs digitization has destroyed and the immense gains it provides, I don't think it so bad. Despite the authors criticism it's still an improvement.

I find his argument hard to follow, the author wants to solve 'the problem', but I don't quite get it. The all purpose machine was a good idea, having an evolving eco system, competition, forks, etc. is a good thing.

Programming is not designed to solve those things - they're not problems created by programming, but by:

  * Incompetent management
  * Lack of communication
  * Rush to market, rather than integrity of solution
  * No solid requirements

The unfortunate irony here is that the startup mentality promotes the above problems because it's generally not trying to solve a problem, but make money.

Wow, I am not in a startup but a well-established company, yet your list of issues is exactly the issues I am currently facing!

Sad really.

Unfortunately, well-established companies have to (or certainly feel they have to) compete with startups.

Many reports show how time-to-market is more and more important, and 'agile' is the only way.

Even companies well-versed in proper engineering practices move towards the modern 'best practices' and acquire all of the best problems at the same time.

There's no agility here. There is lack of communication and no specifications, however.

No agile development, just a horrible, horrible mess.

Read the article first. (The author is in fact himself a programmer who loves what he does.) The reason he says it sucks is not because it isn't interesting, but because modern programming is using a machine (the computer) to solve problems that that machine was never meant to solve and is actually rather ill-fitted to solve. He says that all the pay-offs and work-arounds we have had to use to get computers (originally a purely mathematical machine) to do what we want is the cause of many, if not most, problems in programming.

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