Why is programming so captivating, yet so agonizing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is programming so captivating, yet so agonizing?

#51

Post by gjvc » Fri, Jul 24, 2026, 11:19 PM UTC

blah blah blah "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 the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures." blah blah blah

   -- The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

often quoted in cringe-inducing hand-wringing blog posts

Re: Why is programming so captivating, yet so agonizing?

#52

Post by classified » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 11:19 AM UTC

vitally3643 wrote: post #25

classified wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, I have another one: Being confronted with my own stupidity and my own limits in mental capacity. The shocking thing is that this never goes away, even after decades of practice.

Spoiler alert: this happens to literally everyone in every field and profession every single day.

I guess it happens to everyone who tries to overcome their limitations.

Re: Why is programming so captivating, yet so agonizing?

#53

Post by tombert » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

z500 wrote: post #38

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's the exact opposite. I don't like math. I have very little intuition for it. Programming is not math for me even though people try to tell me that it is. Programming is my way to create something. It's like drawing or woodworking. It is creative and logical. That's why I don't mind or even like sysadmin stuff. But I know a lot of coworkers that don't like ops and in my company you don't have to do that. We…

I've never really been a math person, either, which is why I thought I was going to hate discrete math in college. I mean, it wasn't always the easiest thing ever, but it was a lot more intuitive to me than continuous math. And that's all programming is, materialized discrete math.

When I was pretty young, I saw someone (I don’t remember who actually) show me that an odd number squared is always odd [1].

I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever to be able to know properties for all numbers, without having to test any of them.

[1] most people here already know this, but for posterity, let’s define odd numbers as the expression 2k + 1. Now we square the expression which expands to 4k^2 + 4k + 1. We can factor this to 2(2k^2 + 2k) + 1. We can set the parenthetical expression to u, so we now have 2u + 1, which looks a lot like our original expression, showing it will always be odd.