Hacker News Reader

Comment by ozgrakkurt | Hacker News Reader

Thinking 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

View on HN

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.

Also remember that programs were much smaller, code had to be typed in full and read accurately because compilers were slow and you didn't want to waste time for a syntax error. Anyway it's common even today to work half a day thinking, debugging, testing and eventually git diff shows only two changed lines.

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.

As I wrote in a separate comment to someone who responded to me, there is a difference between:

  (a) thinking about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and 
  (b) the thinking that is required during implementation.

{type (a)} was always the majority of my time, but {type (b)} consumed a lot of effort, especially for languages or syntaxes I wasn't very familiar with. {type (b)} consumes very little of my time now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com