alt Hacker News> which is that the actual programming is not the hard part. Figuring out what exactly needs programmed is the hard part.
I’m growing tired of this aphorism because I’ve been in enough situations where it was not true.
Some times the programming part really is very hard even when it’s easy to know what needs to be built. I’ve worked on some projects where the business proposition was conceptually simple but the whole reason the business opportunity existed was that it was an extremely hard engineering problem.
I can see how one could go through a career where the programming itself is not that hard if you’re mostly connecting existing frameworks together and setting up all of the tests and CI infrastructure around it. I have also had jobs where none of the programming problems were all that complicated but we spent hundreds of hours dealing with all of the meetings, documents and debates surrounding every change. Those were not my favorite companies
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Yep, I think people who repeat this aphorism essentially equate programming with typing, or as you say just connecting existing bits together. Programming is the working out how to get a computer to perform some task, not just the typing, it's the algorithms, the performance balancing, the structuring, the integration etc.
Imagine telling workers at a construction company that the hard problem was never building stuff but figuring out what needs to be built.
The saying also ignores the fact that humans are not perfect programmers, and they all vary in skills and motives. Being a programmer often not about simply writing new code but modifying existing code, and that can be incredibly challenging when that code is hairbrained or overly clever and the people who wrote it are long gone. That involves programming and it's really hard.
>Some times the programming part really is very hard even when it’s easy to know what needs to be built
Sometimes. Most programming jobs out there just need a button on a website or a 2 line fix for some off-by-1 error, though. Those who are working on novel, cutting edge problems are relatively rare.
As you said, most software enginering is connecting existing frameworks together and being in meetings on how/when best to do it. Not necessarily a bad thing at all, but that's why the metaphor of the mechanic or doctor works out here, where the labor to know where and how to fix something is worth much more than the actual part (or medicine's) cost.
> it was an extremely hard engineering problem
But that is not programming then? Doing voice recognition in the 90s, missile guidance systems, you name it, those are hard things, but it's not the "programming" that's hard. It's the figuring out how to do it. The algorithms, the strategy, etc.
I might be misunderstanding, but I cannot see how programming itself can be challenging in any way. It's not trivial per se or quickly over, but I fail to see how it can be anything but mechanical in and of itself. This feels like "writing" as in grammar and typing is the hard part of writing a book.