The noob who thought programming was easy

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11 points·shandsaker··9 comments

I noticed something weird in the programming community: We all seem to want really hard to believe that programming is easy.

I know I got definitely caught up in this whole idea, and attempted to teach programming to everyone around me (girlfriend, sister, dad, coworker). Of course that didn't go very long, because, let's face it programming is difficult. It hit me recently that I've been obsessing about programming and practicing like a maniac every day for years now, and I still suck. Something easy shouldn't take this much effort to learn, right?

Dijkstra wrote in "How do we tell truth that might hurt?" (EWD 498) that "Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics". Regardless of whether he's wrong or right in 2012, I have one question: Why is it a truth that hurts?

I feel like I stepped in some 1990s GeoCities.

That'll take a while to scrape off my shoe...

I agree with the "it took 3 hours to install RVM". Ruby was by far the most time consuming for me to install and get started with. It didn't take 3 hours, but it was way longer than Go, node.js, Python, D, Dart, Haskell, etc., and I did most of these before I installed Ruby...

I don't understand all the Ruby hype out there...

So this is a meme now (animated gif stories)? Unless the meme involves some really interesting technical hack, some new product, or some new business opportunity, HN doesn't seem like the right place to post it.

And it suddenly hits me that programming actually takes effort

This post does very little to dispel the stereotype that girls can't code.

Seriously...this is what you get from it? Ridiculous.

Who upvotes this crap, seriously?

this is actually hilarious

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