alt Hacker NewsThinking is always the hardest part and the bottleneck for me.
It doesn’t capture everyone’s experience when you say thinking is the smaller part of programming.
I don’t even believe a regular person is capable of producing good quality code without thinking 2x the amount they are coding
Replies
jama211 • today at 3:52 AM
Most people (and most businesses) aren’t making good quality code though. Most tools we use have horrible codebases. Therefore now the code can often be a similar quality to before, just done far faster.
Agree. I remember in school in the 1980s reading that a good programmer can write about 10 lines of code a day (citing The Mythical Man-Month) and I thought "that's ridiculous, I can write hundreds of lines a day" but didn't understand that's including all the time understanding requirements, thinking about design, testing, debugging, etc. Writing the code is a small portion of what a software engineer does.