41–50 of 175 posts
Most difficult part for me is letting go. I am compelled to febreeze every bit of code smell I come across. I often rewrite large sections of working code into better structures, more readable/concise syntax, better naming of variables/functions, etc. and In the process I have at times introduced bugs. But that isn't enough to deter me. I feel like I've accomplished something but in reality I have done nothing. It's…
Programming is difficult because people are profiting from the difficultability of it. For as long as you can give someone a money-making machine, but say that it will be 'a lot of esoteric work' to make it, grease it, keep it clean .. there will be development work. By the very nature of the business, if you are not improving something, some human-describable human activity, by using esoteric magic, you're probably…
* Not everyone can program
* Of those that could program, only a small part of them *want* to program
* performance
* modularity
* correctness
* maintainability
* security
* functionality
* robustness
* user-friendliness
* programmer's time
* simplicity
* extensibility
* reliability
* scalability
I think programming is easy. When I sit down to code something, it feels deterministic, and everything falls into place. I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. If I hadn't been this way when I started, I probably wouldn't have started. 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years. That's a lot of time to try a lot of ways to do a lot of things, and find what works. Here's what's difficult for me, and what…
I think programming is easy. When I sit down to code something, it feels deterministic, and everything falls into place. I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. If I hadn't been this way when I started, I probably wouldn't have started. 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years. That's a lot of time to try a lot of ways to do a lot of things, and find what works. Here's what's difficult for me, and what…
Good Article, I have found the hardest part of software to be the team work. It's hard to agreement on what's right, to write code that other people understand, to understand other peoples code, and generally just to get a good productive team working. In fact a lot of software design is just for making things easier for humans. Otherwise we could have files that are 14,000 lines long.... The hardest part of software…
> Good Article, I have found the hardest part of software to be the team work. This... I'm trying to work with someone whose only programming experience is with IDEs on Windows that hand-hold every step of the way. Something as simple as creating a file, compiling it and running it in a terminal is something he's never done. I've spent more time trying to explain incredibly basic concepts than actually getting anythi…
Programming is difficult because people are profiting from the difficultability of it. For as long as you can give someone a money-making machine, but say that it will be 'a lot of esoteric work' to make it, grease it, keep it clean .. there will be development work. By the very nature of the business, if you are not improving something, some human-describable human activity, by using esoteric magic, you're probably…
Anyone can learn plumbing, framing, or drywall too, that doesn't mean we should all learn to do everything we need done. Furthermore it's not feasible or practical for anyone to be a master of everything. This view point overlooks the fact that people don't have infinite time and resources for learning and/or creating stuff. It also ignores the role of specialization.
Learning how to garden has improved my code structure and how I think about relationships and similarities between things from learning about the relationships between different plant species, families and cultures. As well as looking at how they grow (it's very functional).
My point being that a lot skills overlap and I think we can master far more than we give ourselves credit for. But because we think it's not feasible few of us open ourselves to the possibility.
Too often when problems like those mentioned by Joe are brought up in discussion, the (seemingly) majority of programmers argue that these are just complexities we have to deal with. Perhaps they're just the vocal ones. I admit, it is a pragmatic attitude, but I constantly daydream about an environment, both technical and social, where these problems mostly disappear.
Thankfully, we're starting to approach some solutions on the technical side with virtual environments, deterministic builds, etc.. The social side I hope will fall out of having better environments for reproducible behaviour. Although I believe a total solution is technically impossible (at least practically, e.g. requiring total system verification, managed behaviour, etc.), I think we can make a lot of improvements to the environments we currently use.
I think programming is easy. When I sit down to code something, it feels deterministic, and everything falls into place. I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. If I hadn't been this way when I started, I probably wouldn't have started. 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years. That's a lot of time to try a lot of ways to do a lot of things, and find what works. Here's what's difficult for me, and what…
I think programming is easy. When I sit down to code something, it feels deterministic, and everything falls into place. I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. If I hadn't been this way when I started, I probably wouldn't have started. 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years. That's a lot of time to try a lot of ways to do a lot of things, and find what works. Here's what's difficult for me, and what…