“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

Cows are the most common animal on the farm, and overall they produce the most value. But they are very replaceable. When times are bad, you slaughter them.

Cows are like your rank-and-file application developers: you scale them up and down with the times.

Goats are more niche. You don't have many of them on your farm. But they solve important problems (eating weeds), and they look after themselves, so you seldom slaughter goats.

Goats are like specialists in your company. People who know how the "real" things operate. You don't need many of them. But they are involved in enough critical things, niches that can't be scaled down, that you seldom lay them off

It really depends on how that phrase has been used, as coding to me and to others was never hardest part - dealing with other BS however still is. I don't feel insulted at this expression at all, but it sure sounds like something that "modern audience" members would say, where it does not matter what you say, but how insulting it is perceived by others - by their definition and withing their limited scope of perception.

>>If coding is easy, was Carmack just at the right place at the right time?

Yes, coding here is not so much important as mathematics and algorithms and showman figure of John Carmack makes him more than just a coder that goes to recluse to do coding. The successful engine for DOOM and licensing it to other (lazy?) developers that did not want to make their own engine(or were unable to make their own) is comparable to success of coder known as Bil Gates(notoriously known by directed hate at him). Apart from those games, that were successful with DOOM engines, there were many that were not so successful and even failures, but those are not(and should not) attributed to success of DOOM engine. Not to mention, that there were also successful games that did not use DOOM engines, but it seems that it is hard to imagine such thing when new game developers only know and are using Unity nowadays...

I enjoyed Sid Meyers and Jon Van Caneghem games more and I was spending more hours with Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic games than Wolfenstein and DOOM. Also, as someone that was marveling at demoscene that was thriving at that time, it sounds like insult to think that gaming industry and coding as art was thriving only because of few people - it was a culture, where giants like IBM were molding it for decades.

>>>Those decades spent fighting memory bugs in C or C++, with the scars to prove it, are worthless in the age of Rust, Go, Python and JavaScript.

LOL. When dealing with myths surviving from past you need to develop whole new mythology.

If you fought memory bug once you don't need decades to deal with them repeatedly... also Rust clearly is not ready to be used to make games with "safe code". I would assume that you can make application made with Rust to slug your OS resources by intention as well - the fact that these things were done before unintentionally does not make much difference how language can be used. Python is not the best example as well, as wrong indentation can make your program behave in ways you did not expect and finding and correct that indentation can be a challenge if that indentation is not perceived as error by compiler - not a problem if you are only using Python as interpretative language with one line codes.