Why does programming suck?

> What would programming be to you in an ideal world?

Very interesting thoughts about this. I wouldn't think programming sucks, until you think about how it could be in an ideal world.

I'd love to see a follow-up article about what the OP thinks about that question.

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

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.

The article is a long rant, but wrong on more premises and conclusions. And yet, by quoting the people who were actually right in the cases they wrote about, it appears more correct than it is.

There are too many wrong "conclusions" and premises in the text, just an example, here's the author writing about Babbage's and his Analytical Machine:

"he was focused on doing math fast and without errors. He didn’t care how complex the machine was as long as it accomplished that."

Of course, not true, Babbage had to care. He was designing a purely mechanical machine for years at the time when nobody had electrical logical circuits. He designed the simplest "universal enough" machine in the limits of the technology of his time. And the design was never built. But to claim that his design was "too complex" the author would have to design a significantly simpler one under the same limitations and goals.

The whole article is, unfortunately, like this. Uses something that actually happened or somebody did say, "concludes" something else. And the claims that aren't that kind of "conclusions" also sound like from somebody who only very partially understands what he writes about.

This doesn't mean that the author shouldn't attempt to write more articles, he can learn something from it (although I'd suggest him to base his writing on his own, specific, experiences) just that this article as it is is a quite bad potential basis for a serious discussion, IMHO.

He asks "Is there another hardware, general-purpose or not, that would fit our needs more precisely while being cheaper to program?"

The answer is a simple "no." The author just doesn't understand how much of everything was invested up to now for him to pay so little for the CPU's he uses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

Note just the "plant stat-up costs in billions" column. And that's just a piece in the whole puzzle. There are big gains for those who'd improve a current state, so the humanity as the whole is much more motivated for the real improvements, where they are possible, than the author assumes.

When we remove wrong conclusions after quoting others, the rant can be summed up to just a few claims, one of major being "I'm confronted with different frameworks and libraries, "everybody" solves similar problems, it "sucks" to work this way, maybe the hardware is the main problem." No.

Shouldn't the title refer to Software Engineering or Software in general instead of Programming? The word programming (for me) represents a more abstract meaning, like getting your thoughts in the physical world.