Programming is Hard!
posted under category: Software Quality on February 13, 2020 by Nathan
Maybe you don’t remember, so let me remind us all how hard programming is.
I have four children. Believe me when I say that I have been trying to get them to program from a very young age, and so far it’s not all roses and candy treats. Usually there is an amount of familiarization that a flourishing person needs to have with a subject in order to comprehend it fully. Learning how to read, for example, takes sounding out letters, followed by dick-and-jane books, followed by frustration, some time off (usually months), and then retrying, usually with a higher amount of success. Learning to read is a long process and doing it well involves creating many new brain pathways.
Imagine trying to teach your parents to program. With only a few exceptions, there’s a very high chance they simply won’t be able to get it.
This is something I wrestle with, and recently I’ve come to the conclusion that the standard human brain can’t easily grasp the concept of templating. Instead of building something, we programmers are building something for someone else to build something. The more meta up that chain our brains can go, the better a programmer we tend to be. Problems are always solved on a higher level than they were created.
Let’s say that we learned programming, we make our first application, we send it out for our users to try it, and what happens? It doesn’t work! We thought of every conceivable possibility. The problem was that we didn’t conceive of enough possibilities.
“Software is not governed by Moore’s Law; more like Murphy’s Law”
– Douglas Crockford
Even when we find a good solution, that doesn’t mean we’ve reached programming bliss.
“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.”
– Jamie Zawinski
Sometimes progress is very hard and it can literally take years to get past our hurdles. My friend Ben wrote this a number of years ago:
“Every time I think I am making progress, I come to realize that I only have more confusion over the ‘right’ way to implement something”
– Ben Nadel
But don’t forget, programming is very difficult. It can be near-infinitely complex. Think about this for a couple minutes:
“Computer programs are the most complex things that humans make. Programs are made up of a huge number of parts, expressed as functions, statements, and expressions that are arranged in sequences that must be virtually free of error. The runtime behavior has little resemblance to the program that implements it. Software is usually expected to be modified over the course of its productive life. The process of converting one correct program into a different correct program is extremely challenging.”
– Douglas Crockford
If you’re programming, you are doing something extremely intricate. You are valuable because most people cannot do what you are doing. But wait! Your value isn’t only in programming, you are especially valuable because of your ability to put business processes to computers, and to explain these computer systems back to the business.