I believe author means things like code, build system, etc when they say "inputs are beautiful". Cause In my experience one of the major inhibitors of beautiful code, what takes many tests, and what makes dev hard is how fucked up input is. Esp user, as in interactive human, input.
Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
21–30 of 117 posts
Re: Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
#22In my experience, the overwhelmingly most difficult thing about programming is writing code that makes sense, even after it has gone through a couple rounds of requirements changes and bug fixes. Any concrete coding task can be dealt with straightforwardly enough, but projects as a whole tend to deteriorate by arbitrary fixes, maintenance patches, and failure to uphold a conceptual schema. The idea of composability i…
I think it's difficult because no one particular change is a problem and in isolation they are mostly completely reasonable. It's the accumulation of these changes that cause the code to rot.
There are a whole heap of "human nature" problems that are the same like getting into debt, being over weight, protecting the environment. The short term pay-off is fairly big, the contribution to the long term problem is very small.
Also the person who is often responsible for making the decision may not be technical, so finds it difficult to imagine the eventual impact. Plus in the fast moving field of software development, they'll be unlikely to even be around when it happens.
Re: Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
#23If David Sedaris was a software developer...
Re: Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
#24The bigger question is, why are we still programming the way we did 20yrs ago? Higher level languages were a great improvement over machine language. But what comes next? Why don't we have it yet? A decade ago I was setting up database, writing queries, designing forms, writing the code to wire it all up. I still have to do all these steps with more amount of effort today.
We have not seen any theoretical breakthroughs in over 20 years anyway. Unlikely programming is going to change fundamentally. But there is a lot of game changing practical advances which totally overturned the way we design systems. Microcontrollers are powerful and dirt cheap now. Low end FPGAs are more accessible than ever. GPGPU is a dramatic game changer, and it is dead easy to use it these days. RAM is nearly i…
Yeah, practical and cultural shifts determine how the theoretical foundations come into play.
Ten years ago, if you said you were into functional programming, most people wondered if you were crazy and why you didn't just program in a real, normal language.
Fifteen years ago, garbage collection was considered slow and mostly only suitable for "scripting."
Twenty-five years ago, there was Haskell, Erlang, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, and so much cool technology and visionary ideas. For most of the time since, it's all been considered weird, fringe, academic stuff.
The past decades of industrial talk about best practices and methodology doesn't seem to have been wildly successful, and now we're looking at other ideas in a diverse way. So it's an interesting time.
Re: Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
#25I don't think programming - in the sense of what 99% of programmers do - is as difficult as programmers love to blog about. Most professional programmers write stuff that is not all that hard, and most of it has been done by others countless number of times. All the "hard" cutting edge stuff is done by a tiny tiny fraction of programmers. Heck even the things people think are cutting edge now, just taking a random ex…
My pet theory is that even relatively simple programming problems drain a very limited daily resource of programming time (something on the order of 2-4 hours of real work per day). Because a programmer can be drained of programming ability so quickly we just compensate by blogging, posting, talking about it incessantly as a backfill.
Re: Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
#26It is not difficult, trust me. I know C, C++ , Java and Phyton. It is all about logics and the only thing that differs is the syntax. Get in touch I might help you
Too many guys like this are what makes software dev hard. Too many yahoos who think its just about code. Code is only an implementation detail of how most dev is done today. Even today, code isn't about the code. It's about explaining your program, your process, wtf you where thing when designed this thing to the next guy/gal. Sadly, what too much code tells us is "Design? That's what gui people do, right? I just kep…
So much this. My cohorts and I aren't spending hours talking about why we should use es2015 or typescript or whatever else. We're spending hours nearly coming to blows over how to properly implement a Flux architecture.
Re: Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
#27I don't think programming - in the sense of what 99% of programmers do - is as difficult as programmers love to blog about. Most professional programmers write stuff that is not all that hard, and most of it has been done by others countless number of times. All the "hard" cutting edge stuff is done by a tiny tiny fraction of programmers. Heck even the things people think are cutting edge now, just taking a random ex…
There used to be a difference between scripters and programmers. I'm a scripter, and it feels similar to learning a natural language and writing essays in it. In other words, it's easy and doesn't require any mathematical skill.
There are low-level programmers who do things similar to other sciences involving math, and my brain wouldn't be able to do that.
So if you're talking about scripting, which I think most people do, then I agree it isn't difficult.
Re: Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
#28It is not difficult, trust me. I know C, C++ , Java and Phyton. It is all about logics and the only thing that differs is the syntax. Get in touch I might help you
All conventional imperative languages? Open your mind. Try Prolog. Try Clojure. Try Verilog.
Re: Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
#29In my experience, the overwhelmingly most difficult thing about programming is writing code that makes sense, even after it has gone through a couple rounds of requirements changes and bug fixes. Any concrete coding task can be dealt with straightforwardly enough, but projects as a whole tend to deteriorate by arbitrary fixes, maintenance patches, and failure to uphold a conceptual schema. The idea of composability i…
Do you think that sort of a problem (incremental changes eroding an initially sound structure) could be fixed with better refactoring tools? It seems like the issue you're describing is that logic is leaking from some parts of the codebase to others, which might be fixable with sufficiently powerful refactorings.
Yes. But it's still a lot of work to identify what to click on in an overly complicated function / class and then to select "Transmogrification # 17" on it/them.
Getting to a deeper understanding of what the old code is doing takes a lot of work. When we get to that point, refactoring to make what we learned apparent is a good idea. Assuming there is a way to test the changes. (Now I get to spend 2 days making "mocks" in environment X -- learning the mockup tool, and determining the content appropriate for the use cases)
It's a good point you bring up, but it's not a freebie. I am in favor of doing what you said, when you can.
Re: Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
See the middle part "there is not enough time to do it right first time"
And even if there happens to be, check back in six months and see what's happened. Did your beautiful design smoothly accommodate the fix for the tricky issue #5388? Was there enough time then to update your clear documentation, or does the documentation now clearly explain something false? Did the new coworker who implemented that new feature understand the point of your design such that she was able to extend it pr…
Agreed