Hacker News Reader

Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

Proficiency in coding isn't the interesting part of solving problems with software, though. Or as I sometimes say, "That's not programming, that's just typing".

View on HN

I'm glad you have that much respect for the word "programming." I hate it when people try to define a hierarchy out of words, like programming < development < engineering < architecture. Using different words for programming in the large and programming in the small, or programming well versus programming poorly, has aided and abetted so much bullshit and earned us nothing. Programming can be and should be like writing, a word that manages to span Virginia Woolf writing Mrs. Dalloway to me writing this comment without being any the worse for it.

I just solved a system-wide, time-consuming problem by making it cease to exist. Rather than writing code, I rendered a lot of existing code irrelevant (it has architectural implications as well).

According to the typists, that's not "programming", because I didn't "code" anything. Feh. The actual implementation will touch hundreds of lines of code across numerous programs, but it's trivial. A monkey could do it, if told how. I'm gonna tell the monkeys and let them do it.

Realizing a better solution for a thorny problem? That's interesting. That's the real fun of programming.

Writing a program is like writing. Engineering a system is not like writing.

That's not to say there's not a lot of bullshit around the terms programmer, developer, engineer, and architect, but there are different skill sets when it comes to programming vs engineering.

I don't think you're doing justice to the diversity of challenges that can be involved in writing. Writing has high-level structure as well as low-level structure. Someone can be skilled at constructing a sentence but not a book and vice-versa. I could go on, but tl;dr there are a lot of considerations that affect whether a piece of writing "works" and correspondingly large sets of skills, processes, and approaches.

The verb "to program" is conjugated as follows:

I architect, you code, (s)he debugs.

You can throw in "design" and "model" as well.

In some jurisdictions it's -> I Haskell, you Go, s/he Javascripts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com