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Comment by geedelight | Hacker News Reader

I don't know whats all the fuss about programming being so "special".Everything is hard - music is hard, carpentry is hard, poetry is hard, designing a effiecient vacuum cleaner is hard , but wonder why only we programmers make so much noise all the time

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If a musician has her instrument on hand, she can make music, every single time. Musicians are really quite reliable. Their improvisations and crowd-pleasers won't all be as good as the best works of Mozart, or Monk, or even Billy Joel, but chances are that the crowd will be at least moderately pleased. Cover bands do not routinely run 300% over budget and six months late, and if they do you can be confident that the fault was entirely theirs -- it's not that the gig, which seemed simple on the surface, turned out to be completely intractable.

A skilled carpenter or vacuum-cleaner engineer might not produce a masterpiece every time. But the result will probably be a house that doesn't fall down, or a thing that picks up some dust for at least a little while. Vacuum cleaners are a well-understood technology, and while carpentry projects do occasionally go nonlinear (if you change the specs mid-project, or a freak windstorm blows up, or they discover a natural spring while digging your basement, or... well, just go read Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, one of the greatest engineering books of all time ;) they are nonetheless relatively predictable, and the more experienced the carpenter the fewer surprises you can expect.

Now go read Dreaming in Code, which shows that even if you are Mitch "I Built Lotus" Kapor and you hire Andy "Mac OS 1.0" Hertzfeld your software project may fly straight into a wall: You may blow the schedule by a factor of five, and the budget by a factor of ten, and still not ship anything. [1] It has happened. People who write books about corporate IT throw around numbers like fifty percent when discussing the odds that a given software project will succeed. And the reason why programmers don't stop talking about this is that it is vitally important that our clients understand the risk in advance! Which they often don't. Nothing in their everyday experience with plumbers, dentists, and caterers has prepared them for it.

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[1] Note: These numbers are not the ones from Dreaming in Code. I made them up. ;) I actually have yet to finish Dreaming in Code. It induces painful flashbacks.

You ever heard of a one-hit wonder? There countless of them. There are also numerous examples of extremely popular bands releasing an album that is panned by critics, fans, or both (read: Metallica). I agree with your parent post, every discipline involving art and talent is complex and difficult if you're interested in it and delve deep enough into it. It's just that programming gets a lot of attention on the Internet, especially Hacker News, but that's no surprise, is it?

I've read Dreaming in Code, and I don't think you can draw many conclusions from it. The project was especially undisciplined, and given that Kapor started it, I think he has to take most of the blame.

Some musicians make noise too! Seriously, music teachers etc. also wonder about how to teach, how to determine which studets has potential and so on. But they usually dont do it on HN, so it is probably a case of confirmation bias if you think programmers make more noise or talk and think more about their profession than people in other walks of life.

It's not that "only we programmers make so much noise all the time", you have to remember that the internet is the domain of the programmer.

It seems like we make so much noise because we are the feudal lords of the online fiefdom. If you were to spend all your time in wood shops for example, you'd wonder why carpenters complain so much.

I think it stems from the fact that you actually have to understand a problem in computer science to comprehend it's difficulty. In carpentry, for example, anyone can observe a finely carved piece of wood work and immediately know that it was a difficult to make. In computer science you show a layman gcc next to the Windows calculator program and my guess would be a majority would choose the calculator as the more difficult of the two. This likely makes us computer scientists feel like we have to explicitly state the difficulty of our accomplishments where as for some better understood professions it is implied. I mean there are loads of people out there who think that they know everything there is to know about a computer because they can upgrade their sound card and install windows w/o setting their house on fire.

I don't care about programming being special. I just want to understand what makes it hard so that I can be a better programmer.

Programming isn't nearly as well understood as those other fields you mentioned. I also think it's harder than all of those things.

Why do programmers talk so much about programming? Hmm, I wonder...

As I read your comment, you're suggesting it's a form of self-involvement. If so, I don't think that's quite fair. Programming has been around for fifty years. That far into, say, the industrial revolution, people were talking about it a lot. In fact, it was at least a hundred years before industrialization began to be understood and quite a while later before you get Taylor and Ford. And software is far more complicated than that. So the reason we talk obsessively about programming is that we've barely begun, it's really important and fascinating, and we don't understand it.

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