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Is Programming That Easy?

3 points by ghassenfaidi ↗ HN
Am I the only one who finds it odd when I hear someone say "coding was never the hard part" I've been studying CS for 3 years at a college, and I'm slowly improving my programming skills, it's just mind blowing how much one has to learn, it took me weeks of searching and practice to fully grasp how promises and asynchronous programming really work (understanding the event loop, and so on) and more weeks of practice just to start to use it effectively. Learning a Lisp took me a couple of months of independent study, understanding closures, thunks and FP-related concepts (it helped me later in develop a deeper understanding of JavaScript.)

And there are more examples, to me it feels there is a lot to learn just to become a good programmer! remember Peter Norvig's on how it takes around 10 years to get the hand of programming, to me it makes so much sense. Right now I'm getting into test driven development (TDD) through Helsinki's new online TDD course, it's mind blowing how painful it is to get used to it, I hear it takes a year or two of deliberate practise to actually start to use it well.

I know this seems like a vent but I just don't get it! it's as if experienced people are blind to this, as if they forgot how much effort it took to get there. And what some people say like "it was never the hard part" does have a lot of impact on people starting out or those in the middle of the journey. And of course being hard doesn't mean it can't be replaced (either partially or completely) by AI tools. I believe that's a separate topic.

5 comments

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tomxor
You're not wrong, It's only the easy part in hindsight once you know most of the nuts and bolts, because then it's the endless journey of intractable abstract problems and to some degree even more philosophical and ideological problems that sit atop programming.

That doesn't make starting out any easier though, and we do forget that.

spottedmarley
Coding isn't the hard part, it's the challenging part, so if you enjoy the challenge then it's easy, otherwise it can seem like the hard part.
ghassenfaidi
> "Coding isn't the hard part, it's the challenging part"

So what you're saying that it's a challenging part but not the hardest part? If so, that sounds fair as a take to me. But I don't get your point about "if you enjoy the challenge then it's easy". And It feels to me it's the opposite. You'd only start enjoying it once you've spend a lot of time practicing and honing your skills. (and I don't think it's that fun, it's like... 5% of the time fun? i.e. when you suddenly understand a bug or something or when all of tests pass in TDD)

iagiagiag
I'm not sure this sentence actually means it's technically easy. Obviously it depends on the program, making a simple web page is not the same as building an MMORPG. But other aspects of development can be often overlooked by programmers, like software design. Or like marketing, selling the project you did.

Programming was never the hard part for experienced programmers. And now that AI "solved" it, these programmers still face the same challenges they faced before.

vladkens
There's a difference between coding and programming. Coding itself is not hard — like when you use some framework to build another form on an e-commerce site. But programming itself is harder, since it means you need good knowledge in some area to be really good. Even in the era of agents, real programming is still needed, because AI knows a lot, but asking the right questions or thinking about architecture is still your job.