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Why Programming is Difficult

joearms.github.io

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Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#81

Post by mannykannot »

benched wrote: post #40

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…

Are there no aspects of programming that present any sort of challenge to you? Lockless concurrency? cryptography? The various things that the AI community has been struggling with over the last quarter-century?

Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#82

Post by dorkrawk »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #20
sdegutis wrote: post #11

I think "bad environment" is the worst of all the problems. At first we had no environment, so we had to make it ourselves. A few companies did this, and turned into monopolies. Then we started trying to make free/open-source environments to combat this problem, but they ended up so incredibly scatterbrained that compatibility is a very real and current nightmare. The monopolies are trying really hard to give us good…

Free/open source OSes are great programming environments that leave you in control. As for the compatibility 'problem', install the compiler/interpreter version you need from source, use chroot if you need to, etc... If you're making apps to run on said scatterbrained systems, you can ship statically linked libraries with the app, or use a cross-platform solution (Java, HTML5, something like Haxe, etc...).

I think a big problem with environments is the balance between "having control" and "having to control". Sometimes just getting things set up to the point where I can actually do the work I wanted to do sucks up a lot of gumption.

Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#83

Post by eurleif »

gaius wrote: post #79
shadowfiend wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than focusing on the IQ remark, I'll mention that the entire point of this post is that programming is not just “sit[ting] down to code something”. A program written in a vacuum when you're sitting in your chair is useful to precisely one person at precisely one point in time: you, right now. When you're working on teams, under managers, within organizations, you're working to build something that's useful for…

This is why, when I see 22-year-old kids in interviews claiming 10 years of programming experience, that's a negative signal for me. Commercial programming is solving problems you didn't choose, in a language that's not your favourite, using existing code you didn't write, for people you would never have met outside the job, in less time than you would like. In most real situations writing the code is the easy part,…

How do you know you're not underestimating what a 12 year old can do?

Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#84

Post by truthteller »

lutusp wrote: post #67
benched wrote: post #40

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 attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. (...) A person with an IQ at or above 145, who is also fully conversant with reality, would know that IQ testing has a reputation nearly as bad the field of psychology that popularized the activity in the first place. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man > 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years. A person of your age should know better than to use…

"the mismeasure of man" is a garbage book by the noted fraud and liar steven jay gould. it certainly should not be used as any sort of reference on intelligence testing.

Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#85

Post by invalidOrTaken »

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #29
fit2rule wrote: post #9

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…

> Programming is difficult because people are profiting from the "difficultability" of it That's backwards. Not "anyone" can program computers. Anyone can try , but most will fail. Just like "anyone" can "do math" or "do chemistry" or "do anything", but most will fail. The reason programming is lucrative, whether as an employee or entrepeneur exploiting programmers' labor (or supplying their own technical labor), is…

>It's a curious thing, this misplaced, or in some cases faux-humility about programming, or any other academic/intellectual endeavour.

Programming rewards the rational, and compilers and bugs have no sense of survival that would make them relent in the face of intimidation. So programmers deal with compilers and computers on their terms: the unfailingly rational.

Humans are not computers. Humans do respond to intimidation---or rather, they respond to relative intimidation. Programmers are carrying tweezers in the fencing societies that corporations are.

Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#86

Post by waterlesscloud »

philh wrote: post #68
psychometry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that your inability to relate to other people in your organization is related to your obvious superiority complex? No one cares what your IQ is. There are many different kinds of intelligence and some of them, like social and emotional intelligence, also contribute to your personal success within any particular organization.

I find it a little amusing that you would talk about social and emotional intelligence, right after you directly accuse someone of having a superiority complex. No one cares what vis IQ is, but they care how good ve is at programming, and ve attributed vis programming ability to vis IQ. Do you think that connection is false, i.e. that there is only weak correlation between programming ability and IQ?

As soon as I read OP's sentence about his IQ, I knew someone would respond, showing their lack of emotional intelligence by attacking him over it.

Thread did not disappoint.

Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#87

Post by truthteller »

lutusp wrote: post #76
sejje wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. I've never used my IQ as justification for anything, granted, but I had no idea it wasn't considered a solid measurement. I just assumed it was like most of the other tests I did well on, and filed it away. You're paying more attention to it than I am.

> I don't agree. Evidence trumps opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Criticism... > I've never used my IQ as justification for anything, granted, but I had no idea it wasn't considered a solid measurement. It isn't remotely a "solid measurement", in fact it's a field surrounded by justified controversy on multiple grounds. The two primary objections are that (a) the tests favor certain populat…

from your link: "The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that in the United States IQ tests as predictors of social achievement are not biased against African Americans since they predict future performance, such as school achievement, similarly to the way they predict future performance for Caucasians."

so the consensus in psychometrics is that iq tests are not systematically biased against particular groups.

and of course it measures a lot more than a person's ability to take intelligence tests". just look at the "social outcomes" section of the wikipedia page...

Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#88

Post by abvdasker »

yodsanklai wrote: post #5

To me what is difficult about programming is to deal with huge undocumented and badly written legacy code, and also understanding tons of frameworks and APIs. Algorithms are the easy part.

Yes. My company's CRM uses a single 2500-line Perl script to handle all of its licensing emails. The script was written by our current VP of engineering in 1998 when our CRM was still built on ActiveX. I started porting this code over to Ruby for our now Rails-based CRM and I am beginning to doubt I will ever finish.

Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#89

Post by sdegutis »

dorkrawk wrote: post #82
Mikeb85 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free/open source OSes are great programming environments that leave you in control. As for the compatibility 'problem', install the compiler/interpreter version you need from source, use chroot if you need to, etc... If you're making apps to run on said scatterbrained systems, you can ship statically linked libraries with the app, or use a cross-platform solution (Java, HTML5, something like Haxe, etc...).

I think a big problem with environments is the balance between "having control" and "having to control". Sometimes just getting things set up to the point where I can actually do the work I wanted to do sucks up a lot of gumption.

Every time I try linux, I lose several days in config files, and at the end, it's still not perfect, just "good enough for now".

Re: Why Programming is Difficult

#90

Post by lutusp »

truthteller wrote: post #87
lutusp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't agree. Evidence trumps opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Criticism... > I've never used my IQ as justification for anything, granted, but I had no idea it wasn't considered a solid measurement. It isn't remotely a "solid measurement", in fact it's a field surrounded by justified controversy on multiple grounds. The two primary objections are that (a) the tests favor certain populat…

from your link: "The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that in the United States IQ tests as predictors of social achievement are not biased against African Americans since they predict future performance, such as school achievement, similarly to the way they predict future performance for Caucasians." so the consensus in psychometrics is that iq tests are not system…

> The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that in the United States IQ tests as predictors of social achievement are not biased against African Americans since they predict future performance ...

The flaw in the reasoning should be obvious to anyone but a psychologist -- the test outcome becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, rather than an unbiased predictor of future performance. The contempt for science among psychologists is shocking.

> so the consensus in psychometrics is that iq tests are not systematically biased against particular groups.

Psychologists also came to a consensus among themselves (and, as usual, without any scientific evidence) that Asperger's was a real mental illness, and that Recovered Memory Therapy was a real therapeutic method. Fortunately, and to some extent because of these credibility issues, society is in the midst of dumping psychology as a serious endeavor:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

In summary, until there is some science in brain research, all this talk about IQ testing is overreliant on effects without any clue about causes -- on descriptions without explanations.

Notice the name of President Obama's recently announced program -- the "Brain Initiative", not the "Mind Initiative". The handwriting is on the wall.

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