Is Programming That Easy? | Hacker News Reader

Is Programming That Easy?

5 pointsghassenfaidi8 comments

Am I the only one who finds it odd when I hear someone say "coding was never the hard part" I've been studying CS for 3 years at a college, and I'm slowly improving my programming skills, it's just mind blowing how much one has to learn, it took me weeks of searching and practice to fully grasp how promises and asynchronous programming really work (understanding the event loop, and so on) and more weeks of practice just to start to use it effectively. Learning a Lisp took me a couple of months of independent study, understanding closures, thunks and FP-related concepts (it helped me later in develop a deeper understanding of JavaScript.)

And there are more examples, to me it feels there is a lot to learn just to become a good programmer! remember Peter Norvig's on how it takes around 10 years to get the hand of programming, to me it makes so much sense. Right now I'm getting into test driven development (TDD) through Helsinki's new online TDD course, it's mind blowing how painful it is to get used to it, I hear it takes a year or two of deliberate practise to actually start to use it well.

I know this seems like a vent but I just don't get it! it's as if experienced people are blind to this, as if they forgot how much effort it took to get there. And what some people say like "it was never the hard part" does have a lot of impact on people starting out or those in the middle of the journey. And of course being hard doesn't mean it can't be replaced (either partially or completely) by AI tools. I believe that's a separate topic.

You're not wrong, It's only the easy part in hindsight once you know most of the nuts and bolts, because then it's the endless journey of intractable abstract problems and to some degree even more philosophical and ideological problems that sit atop programming.

That doesn't make starting out any easier though, and we do forget that.

I suppose the core difference is the skill of programming itself has more of an end point, even if that end point is a little fuzzy

There's a difference between coding and programming. Coding itself is not hard — like when you use some framework to build another form on an e-commerce site. But programming itself is harder, since it means you need good knowledge in some area to be really good. Even in the era of agents, real programming is still needed, because AI knows a lot, but asking the right questions or thinking about architecture is still your job.

I'm not sure this sentence actually means it's technically easy. Obviously it depends on the program, making a simple web page is not the same as building an MMORPG. But other aspects of development can be often overlooked by programmers, like software design. Or like marketing, selling the project you did.

Programming was never the hard part for experienced programmers. And now that AI "solved" it, these programmers still face the same challenges they faced before.

Coding isn't the hard part, it's the challenging part, so if you enjoy the challenge then it's easy, otherwise it can seem like the hard part.

> "Coding isn't the hard part, it's the challenging part"

So what you're saying that it's a challenging part but not the hardest part? If so, that sounds fair as a take to me. But I don't get your point about "if you enjoy the challenge then it's easy". And It feels to me it's the opposite. You'd only start enjoying it once you've spend a lot of time practicing and honing your skills. (and I don't think it's that fun, it's like... 5% of the time fun? i.e. when you suddenly understand a bug or something or when all of tests pass in TDD)

It’s like being a mechanic. You either “like” fixing things and making it go or it’s all just a greasy mess that pays your bills.

I can picture in my mind the image of a mechanic that likes and enjoys fixing things. But I do wonder how much of it is real joy. At the end of the day what drives most people is that they want to satisfytheir human needs. bring food to the table. That's life for most people on Earth, then can find meaning elsewhere. And even those who are "passionate", as I said, I do wonder how much of it is pure fun. I asked doctors and engineers about this before, many of them don't feel the constant passion that I see in the picture I imagined. Again, it's a small percentage of the time. When you see a happy patient, when things go as expected, when the final test passes... But what drives most people isn't passion. It's responsiblities and satisfying human needs. And can probably become a great software engineer without falling in love with programming. I'm probably over-analysing what you said though, I do get what you say.

Life is an ouroboros friend. Or a perpetual wheel if you prefer.

There is no constants but that everything comes to an end and everything else moves on.

I still doodle in design and code. Even when there’s no further point!

I have an unfinished JavaScript version of Kriegspiel I’ve been working on for twenty years. Maybe some day I’ll finish it!

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