alt Hacker NewsIt doesn't have to be Shakespeare, but hopefully everybody agrees that writing at Shakespeare's level is indeed hard. I agree that writing good (but not great) or even just ok literature is still hard, but that invites a bunch of no-true-scotsman arguments that I just can't be bothered dealing with (like "writing Fifty Shades of Grey isn't actually hard" or something similar).
The comment I responded to suggested that we don't really have to be "insulted" because code is actually not hard, good code is hard. But the statement "code was never the hard part" doesn't make that distinction, it's a blanket statement, that any normal person would associate with all software. I argue there is no reason to try justifying such a misleading statement.