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'Coding Is Not Fun, It's Technically and Ethically Complex' (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: For starters, the profile of a programmer's mind is pretty uncommon. As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks. Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten. Coding isn't the only job that demands intense focus. But you'd never hear someone say that brain surgery is "fun," or that structural engineering is "easy." When it comes to programming, why do policymakers and technologists pretend otherwise? For one, it helps lure people to the field at a time when software (in the words of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen) is "eating the world" -- and so, by expanding the labor pool, keeps industry ticking over and wages under control. Another reason is that the very word "coding" sounds routine and repetitive, as though there's some sort of key that developers apply by rote to crack any given problem. It doesn't help that Hollywood has cast the "coder" as a socially challenged, type-first-think-later hacker, inevitably white and male, with the power to thwart the Nazis or penetrate the CIA. Insisting on the glamor and fun of coding is the wrong way to acquaint kids with computer science. It insults their intelligence and plants the pernicious notion in their heads that you don't need discipline in order to progress. As anyone with even minimal exposure to making software knows, behind a minute of typing lies an hour of study. It's better to admit that coding is complicated, technically and ethically. Computers, at the moment, can only execute orders, to varying degrees of sophistication. So it's up to the developer to be clear: the machine does what you say, not what you mean. More and more "decisions" are being entrusted to software, including life-or-death ones: think self-driving cars; think semi-autonomous weapons; think Facebook and Google making inferences about your marital, psychological, or physical status, before selling it to the highest bidder. Yet it's rarely in the interests of companies and governments to encourage us to probe what's going on beneath these processes.
"It's Technically and Ethically Complex"
You could say the same about living.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Why do you say "verboten"? Do you think that makes you seem smart? Just say "disallowed" or "forbidden". You're speaking English, you hipster douche.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
>slovenliness is verboten
I mean, you're so right. I wish they cast a trans woman in Sense8 as the hacker, or white & minority women in Silicon Valley as hackers.
Oh wait... /s
The number one problem is that programming involves typing on a keyboard. And so, to politicians and all the other clueless, computer-illiterate masses, programming is nothing more than a simple, routine function that can be handled by any low-level clerk or secretary.
If you don't think programming is fun, then you're really missing out. The reason so many people work on open source code for free is exactly because it is fun, and we can see that the quality of code from people doing things for fun can be quite high.
If programming isn't fun for you, then something's wrong. Maybe you have a manager who completely stifles you, or maybe you only glue together libraries other people wrote. I can see how that wouldn't be much fun. Or maybe you have a manager who writes code, gives it to you, and says, "here, debug this." That would be hell. Either way, if your job is programming change stuff around until you can really see what is so much fun about it, otherwise you're in for a miserable career.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Its complex. And its fun. Part of the reason its fun is that it is complex- if it was easy there'd be no challenge to it. If you don't find the challenge fun, you're in the wrong profession and will be happier elsewhere.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks. Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten.
Attention to detail? Slovenliness? These people must not have looked at much corporate code, there's a world of kludges out there.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Not all of us writing code to throw the switch of a railroad track with an unstoppable locomotive barrelling down towards a group of three deaf people who could not hear it coming, while there is an invalid in a wheelchair on the side track who could not get out even if he could hear it coming. Most of our coding examples are considerably less ethically complicated.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It doesn't help that Hollywood has cast the "coder" as a socially challenged, type-first-think-later hacker, inevitably white and male, with the power to thwart the Nazis or penetrate the CIA. Insisting on the glamor and fun of coding is the wrong way to acquaint kids with computer science
They're not "inevitably" white and male. Even Hackers from the mid 90s shows a racially, ethnically and, yes, sexually diverse cast being techno geniuses and the only villain was a white male so we'd know you'd like that.
Is there any occupation that television and movies depict everyday activities correctly?
Even ones they do themselves like staff writers and directors do not even get anything like realistic treatment.
literally http://www.nakedcapitalism.com...
Well, we can tell that whoever wrote that has never coded for Microsoft, Facebook, or Yelp.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I started programming when I was about 6 or 7 years old. It was fun then, and it's still fun today. I don't notice an enormous qualitative difference, in terms of interest and challenge and ah-hah moments today, since then. The game has gotten much more complex, but the basic inner experience is in many ways essentially the same.
It feels similar, to me, like playing a complex board game. I actually enjoy the experience. I don't know that manic attention to detail is really helpful. I agree that attention to detail is helpful, provided they are the right details, but I also find that a certain openness and ease is helpful as well.
When I tell people that I think programming is fun, I'm not trying to trick them. I'm also not a particularly disciplined person.
a) It is fun, if you're doing it because you want to.
b) Slovenliness isn't verboten, it's the norm.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The idea that "Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten" is more wishful thinking and not nearly embraced enough from my perspective. Shoving crap out the door seems more the reality of software development endeavors.
Of course brain surgery is fun. If you're not having fun at work why are you doing it? Also a large portion of structural engineering is in fact very easy. Not to mention fun too. I am an engineer, but I dabble in programming in my spare time ... for fun.
Whoever wrote that shit needs a reality check. Every field promotes itself on the fun and joy of it. No one says: Why not become a lawyer, we have some of the highest divorce and suicide rates in the white collar world.
The problem is the writer has something dead inside of him.
Maybe we should start saying that. One of the biggest deterrents to potential rock stars in these fields is the mountain of intimidation before the learning process can even begin. How is that productive?
So, I read the article and the point completely eludes me. There is no news here. There are no facts. It reads like it is trying to be a think-piece, but contains no actual information. Even a think piece, with a primary purpose of expressing an opinion, needs to have some sort of basis in facts or information.
This "article" reads more like the introduction to a manifest, or some sort of random pontification.
Don't get me wrong, it is sure to prompt a robust discussion here on /., but the piece itself is not really that exciting.
That said, my perspective is that programming (analysis, coding, testing, etc.) is enjoyable, possibly even "fun," for the simple reason that I enjoy solving complex problems. When I was younger I spent lots of time playing videogames. As I got older and more experienced as a software engineer I began to realize that playing video games (good ones) and developing software are actually the same activity. Except that the former rarely results in a lasting benefit, while the latter is easier to get paid to do.
So, to me, it is the functional equivalent of getting paid to play videogames all day. I can count on one hand the number of days I have not looked forward to going to work in the last few years. So, yes it is complex and has an ethical dimension, but is also lots of fun.
I Had to say it, it just seemed required.
From my perspective, Programming is fun. Programming is like painting, with words and symbols, but when the canvas is completed, you have a moving piece of art capable of doing tasks.
The part that the article is missing, is that "Working" is not fun. Take a child to the beach, and what will they likely do for fun? Dig holes and make sand-castles. Even many adults will enjoy doing this right along with them. Now, fast forward to when they are adults - do they enjoy digging ditches for a living? No, they don't. Once you add the stigma of a job to the activity is when you pull the fun out of it.
Programming for it's own sake is fun. Having to answer for what the program does to your boss is not.
I do what I do because I enjoy doing it. there are many many challenges that I enjoy. Learning what others have done in the open source community, modifications, creating your own solution to an interesting problem (and publishing it the world for brownie points on your resume) or even contributing to a minor/major open source project. I see coding as being part architecture, part construction worker, part problem solver, and part interpreter (business requirements gathering is always lots of fun in case you think there is no contact with non-geek people). It also challenges the way we define things in business and even everyday life. You could even see coders are part philosopher when it comes to your class definitions and constants. Or how about part linguist as you try to make your code easy to read? Or part warrior if you are designing a secure application or are a security specialist (possibly hacker). If you love to pit your wits against hackers, security is where it's it (and well paid I might add). And it can be used in literally any industry where knowledge is applied (and why field isn't). I find it can be as fun or dreary as you choose.
One thing I will say, if you want more challenges/fun in coding, don't start with a fortune 500 company where you'll have more procedures/chains of command than you can shake a stick at because you'll be pigeon-holed there in your cubby unless you start in a senior position (and even then you've got corporate bureaucracy and you'll be forced to learn to speak "legalese"). Anyway that is my two cents (or $1 with inflation in San Fran these days). Like many fields, it often depends where you work.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Not every programming job is either technically or ethically complex. For example analysing particle physics data is a technically complex programming task but raises no ethical issues. In fact, I imagine there are not many ethically complex programming tasks - self-driving cars is one that comes to mind - since most of the ethics are concerned with how you use the program not how you wrote it.
I'm not a programmer, but I design electronics, and I like the logic challenge of specifying components and their connections. I also occasionally lay out circuit boards, and there are some significant logic challenges that I enjoy solving, especially when space is tight and I'm trying to keep from adding layers.
Just because some people enjoy something, it doesn't mean everyone will, but conversely if some people don't like something, it doesn't mean no one does.
I think the real challenge in career choice is finding the right point on a spectrum between enjoyability and prudence. Don't get a programming job just because it's the highest paying option you can find, but also don't spend your life trying to sell your crafts on Etsy, if their is no demand for them. Find something in the middle that provides a good balance between joy and income.
Personally, i think programming is fun - I thought so when I learned it, otherwise why would I have even pursued it to begin with? Especially as a kid when there are lots of things that are fun.
To say programming can also not be fun, is to illustrate a fundamental truth of life - anything can be not fun if you do enough of it, at a high enough level. Most kids love playing sports but there are a lot of things about professional sports that are not fun. Photography makes a great hobby but can be a grueling and nerve-wracking affair if you do much professional work.
Most coding is not actually THAT ethically complex. Yes there are examples that are, but "NotAllCoding" is. Even for the areas that are grey you cannot place the entirely of responsibility at the foot of the programmer, who is operating at such a low level it may not even be possible to decide if they exact work THEY are doing has ethical issues - that is truly for the people planning the whole to determine, and to be responsible for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let me be clear, if you are working in the industry and don't find coding fun, you've fucked up and picked the wrong path.
Also, coders/programmers are the most slovenly disgusting humans outside of third world shanty towns. This article is garbage.
Coding purists need to put up or shut up. If you want the kind of exclusivity and respect you feel you deserve, start an organization that's akin to the AMA, and lobby the government to regulate the field, such that a PhD in computer science is the cost of admission...
Programming jobs may not be fun.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I'm not sure if this is of interest to anyone here, but maybe I should relate my experience with coding as a non-programmer.
The problem I had with 'getting into' programming isn't that the functions and logic behind them was hard to grasp, it was just that the barrier to being able to do anything useful seemed impractically large.
I started out with C++ primer plus, since c++ sounded like the most useful language overall, at least in windows (was that a bad choice?). I remember quitting somewhere around loops and after arrays. It wasn't *that* hard, just mind-numbingly boring.
This still bothers me because I might need to know this stuff at some point in the future. That book was actually one I saw being recommended a lot online too.
I guess the tl;dr question is- Is there a way to get into coding that allows you to learn something mildly useful in the first couple days, and doesn't required mandatory obsessive compulsive disorder to get that far?
I'm having fun. Should I not be? Dang.
... software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks.
It may seem like that to some. To others it's just another Tuesday at the keyboard. Typety, type, type ...
Programming is problem solving.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
To save you the trouble, I read the article.
tl;dr -- Coding is not fun, everybody should know how to do it, and we need to keep the coders in check.
At least now we know where at least one of the Puritans went.
Another reason is that the very word "coding" sounds routine and repetitive, as though there's some sort of key that developers apply by rote to crack any given problem.
The misconception is that there is a code-book, a singular "right way". There is an infinite number of ways to code things.
I've always thought of the term coding to be in the sense of "(en)coding life into software". What do you want the machine to do? You encode that will into a language it can understand. Coding.
If you subscribed to Compute! or Compute! Gazette (Commodore 64), or got one of the programming books, the more complicated programs required that you had to enter eight three-digit numbers (000-254) and a three-digit checksum for each byte (IIRC). Took hours to enter those programs. If you done everything right, the program works. If it didn't work, you had to double check your numbers or re-enter the whole thing over again. Not for the faint of heart!
So when is Congress going to GET OFF THEIR ARSES and fix the H1B problem? They...
OK I got it now. Never mind.
Not everyone in the world is slaving away on death marches managing security/personal information.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"Ethically complex?" Seriously? What a stupid thing to call out.
Tell me what endeavor or occupation doesn't have potential ethical implications if you are not paying attention. Selling scrap metal is "ethically complex" if you don't pay attention to whom you are selling it.
As for fun, if solving problems is not fun to you, then writing code is not for you. If it were never fun there would be no such thing as programming games.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Comparing coders to Neurosurgeons is a bit of a stretch, even for the more liberal minded developers. Some tasks require intense focus, work and time, but for the majority of the tasks we do day to day, it's rather lightweight and easy. If during the standard day you find yourself fighting mental fatigue, exhaustion and constantly battling complex problems, you're probably just a bad developer and shouldn't be in the field.
As an Embedded Engineer, I have to say that unless I'm trying to figure out a rather nasty interface, or developing with a fairly complex sensor array, most of the time, I'm able to relax my mind and take full advantage, enjoying the task at hand. I find that the developers who seem overly switched on all the time, are the weaker ones, because they require a mental/physical output substantially higher, to get the same work done.
The post comes off as a weaker or overly self-important developer trying to make their job seem so much more then it is. If you can't enjoy and love your job as a developer, then you're in the wrong field. If you find yourself switched on mentally at 100% all day and beating your head against the desk to solve every problem, then you're either a very selected programmer, or you're in the wrong field.
Structural engineering is science: it requires real intelligence. Brain surgery is complex: it requires skills. Coding is shit and coders are at best of average intelligence: they just input crap into a machine. There is no study and understanding of the laws of nature. Lame.
If you don't enjoy coding, don't do it. Your post has no discernible value to anyone. You don't get to define what others find fun.
Hmmm. If you're in a field in which you don't find a lot of what you do to be fun, perhaps you should investigate others.
Definitely don't pursue a PhD in Computing Science or Data Science. You might get through a Masters with that attitude, but, even if every second is not a fun-filled circus of joy, you might not be doing this as a career, but as a job.
We don't need people who do it as a job.
Unless you're a COBOL coder, we need those.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'd prefer they analogize coding to watch-making. Or, more accurately, watch-design. Can you design a watch that works? That's cheap? That can be repaired by technicians who aren't as skilled as you, the designer? That doesn't stop working after a month? That actually keeps good time? That looks attractive and has a good user-interface, i.e. the user can set alarms and re-set the time without undue trouble?
So one thing does not exclude the other.
PS.: Before you ask, yes, the Kamasutra is Technically and Ethically complex
... everything else. There are times when it is fun and times where it is a drag, similar to when you take your hobby and then are start making a living at it. It's not always fun and games for everyone, for some people their 'passion' can become their job but for others it must stay their passion.
We've all heard of burnout, in particular the game industry has lots of people with passion who eventually lose it because of horrible work conditions or too long hours, aka they eventually get out of the industry because it's a harsh environment and to keep their love of what they do they find a job in a field with more reasonable working conditions.
As always humanity takes something complex and tries to give a simple answer "AKA programming is not fun". When it is not a either or equation, it's always dependent on the context and the person and people in question.
The “learn to code for fun and profit” narrative is designed to support the claim that all the people who are losing good jobs to automation and offshore mania only need to take a short course in programming to be making the big bucks. The truth that not everyone is suited to be a programmer, and that the “big bucks” programming jobs are becoming as endangered by offshoring as factory jobs, kills that narrative and forces those who are supposed to be running this country to come up with real solutions to the very real employment problems of large numbers of people in the Rust Belt, Coal Belt, You Name It Belt. Those solution are difficult to find, and cost money to implement, which means no tax cuts for the one percenters. Can’t have that, so everyone must become a programmer because that’s the job of the future. Rinse and repeat.
I had fun programming up until I decided to make a career out of it. Now my job just sucks the passion out of it for me.
I should probably switch careers so I can enjoy it again.
Programming is fun. If it isn't fun to you, then you won't be successful as a programmer, and you will be as unhappy in your job as the average worker.
The comparison to a neurosurgeon is hyperbole, but I would compare it more to a novelist. Writing a novel is hard, so hard that people who don't enjoy it don't do it; yet the only evident work in a novel is simply typing.
The main difference between coders and novelists is that shitty coders can still make bank. Because of that, people who hate coding and people who are terrible at it (a venn diagram of almost entirely overlapping circles) sometimes stick with it.
Noveling and Coding have one other awful terrible truth in common: Everybody thinks they can do it.
Some people consider challenging things fun. The worst code that I have to write is the mundane stuff. I try to automate as much of that as possible.
Beauty usually lies in absolute simplicity or pure mad complexity. One analogy for programming can be bringing down the entropy of the world.
Yes, programming can is complex. Yes, programming is fun. Those are not mutually exclusive properties.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
for money. Programming's one of them. The days when tech was dominated by people who wanted to be there are long gone. Outsourcing and Visa abuse mean employers can be choosy and demand a college degree for, well, everything. That same outsourcing drove mechanical engineers and other college grads into code monkeying positions the /. crowd used to get. I'm seeing more and more folks with no interest in code but a keen interested in a paycheck.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A developer attempting to imagine a Greater Purpose for themselves beyond the mundane and generally unimportant details of their life.
He also claims playing piano is not fun after 2 minutes of haphazardly trying to play London bridge is falling down.
We have enough 'protections'.... or as the adults say, Laws on the books.
But your average programmer is an idiot building things for the web and possesses none of those qualities.
Wow. The effort that the tech world puts into convincing people how important they are is rivaling the kings of the trade - teachers and nurses
... the profile of a programmer's mind is pretty uncommon. As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks.
Seriously, get the fuck over yourself. You're not that bloody special because you write code. Your subsequent comparisons to "brain surgery" and "structural engineering" are also entirely overblown.
You can learn to write a useful code after a few part-time courses at a community college. Do you think you could engineer a useful bridge with a similar amount of training?
I fundamentally agree with the post, that programming (let's distinguish it from the truly repetitive "coding") is a technically complex task.
Ethically, I coud argue it is not: the programmer creates a tool, and like all tools, it is up to its user whether it is used for good or evil. By the same reasoning, one could say forging a hammer is ethically complex, as one cannot know whether it will be used to hammer a nail in a scaffold holding up a wall or to bash someone's head in. I'm not advocating that a programmer is without responsibility for the algorithms they create, but they most certainly do not bear full responsibility for how those algorithms are used.
What I'm more surprised at is why it cannot be "fun"? Just because writing a program is complex and challenging task, it can still be a source of enjoyment for the writer. Seeing the code take shape, knowing that you are tackling a problem effectively, understanding the problem and its solution and holding both in your mind, these can all be sources of enjoyment and happiness for the creator.
I think that emphasizing the fun part is not wrong, as long as one does not forget the frustration that comes with the task.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Musicians don't have fun? It's still a job.
Athletes don't have fun? It's also a job.
Why can't programmers have fun? The act of creating and executing, while operating in the zone, is what makes it fun. And why will people try it if they don't know it can be fun?
As an amateur coder, coding bores me, but you man up through the whole thing because of the results at the end of the tunnel. The process usually goes: 1)"Hey, I got a great idea, if the Fwank passed its arguments to the Mgank, it would make the results searchable, and it would save me a lot of time!" 2) You start to do it, and soon realize that, conceptually is easily said in one sentence, but actually making Fwank readable by Mgank takes many hours of tests and tricks... 3) Finally you got the whole thing working and yeah, it's great, but you promise yourself you're not going to waste another minute of your life writing a single line of code ever again. 4) Then a few weeks later, you go: "hey I got a great idea..." etc... :P
I think it's fun.
It really is. Schedules and support make it not as fun, but the actual coding is a blast. If it's not you probably shouldn't be a programmer.
My wife and daughter both learned to program. They can't stand it. They don't understand how I can stand it.
Meanwhile, I'm having a blast writing tons of code and getting paid handsomely for doing something that I also do as a hobby. To much winning!
I don't like having coded, because after I spend a month working on some brilliant code, people ask me, "Where the fuck have you been? We haven't seen you in forever, and you're out of the social group, because you haven't been paying your unspoken dues, while the rest of us have been socializing like normal people. Fuck off and never come back!"
It happens every time I have a great idea.
I find coding fun. I've been doing it for a living for over a decade and I still enjoy it.
The only parts of the job I don't enjoy is when I have to sit around waiting between bits of work.
When coding you are solving a puzzle. Easy puzzles are boring. Easy programming tasks are boring. As a programmer you are basically being paid to solve puzzles for a living. It does not get much better than that for having to do a job.
What and how you count for billing.
What you market as features versus something the salesman conned the UX bunny to create behind the backs of the product team .
And in my current case, analyzing how to show production line performance. We can tell exactly what the operators are doing on the line but the flavor we give to those numbers could be used to grade employees for dismissal or raises. We we can't be slipshod about it.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
i think brain surgery would be 'fun'.
I started writing code in 4th grade on the commodore 64. And although there are many elements of computer programming that are challenging, I have always enjoyed solving the problem and writing the code. So after nearly 20+ years in the industry I still liken what I do to playing video games. ( given a set of inputs, push the correct buttons and create the correct patters, to solve the problem).
So yes, I think it IS fun , among other things. I think the people who are best at it enjoy it! :)
That is probably the same with almost any profession.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?
First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder "for Daddy's office."
Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (...)
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Coding is fun for me as a hobby. As a profession, it was the equivalent of being offered a job as a male porn star but only in roles with morbidly obese/pregnant women or pegging. I've moved on and now I clock out at 4 and go home to my hobbies and my family while some poor schmucks have "fun" coding for 16 hours a day on some boring project equivalent to building a cardboard box that somehow still has bugs for 3 months after release.
If you are driving a car and side swiped and semi out of control your instinct is to save your life. You usually do not have a tiny moment to plan where or how it ends. It has to be unusually rare to have a driver in a position to decide whether he will avoid kids and thus kill himself or hit the kids where they are the least concentrated and thus save himself or just not give a hoot about the kids and look for the most cushy spot to crash. Now if you are working on a computer program that would make such a decision for an autonomous vehicle it might look drastic when you write it. But really it is only an issue because it can be written down ad studied. There are so many variables in such a situation that humans can not function well at all and computers remain deprived of information i such a case as well. For example how able are these kids to jump clear of the on coming vehicle. Are the kids aware or are they in a childish state of mind? At any rate I suppose what I am trying to point out that maybe things like ethics and morals should not be part of a process of evaluation of software. Should Henry Ford be punished for his destruction of the horse related industries and the millions that worked in those industries. Was building a car a moral act? It is endless.
Well they would need people who have studied philosophy and computer science, and those are in short supply.
In fact, I think Universities actively discourage it. Ethics matters in life, but most coding is for the cash, and even if the coder is ethical they often get asked to include something that is dubious, so what can you do turn down the cash or pop it in and see what happens
If you code for yourself, then you have control of licence, so you can be ethical, don't sell to unethical organisations.
I do it because I get paid to do it, and can't do anything else that would earn a comparable salary.
But I keep my chin up because I've done much more onerous things for money. Programming isn't THAT bad.
... with BASIC, LOGO, HTML, etc. with basic coding but more advanced coding got too much and confusing to me. I prefer breaking things as a SQA tester. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...or wherever, but this article IS a masterpiece of trolling aimed *directly* at Slashdots heart!
Don't feed the beast peeps
Jeez.. Does the author know anything about programming? Programming is fun, because you don't have to do the same routine over and over again. If you a good programmer, you always write something new, and something innovative, and no one expects you to be perfect each time. As long as you get basic data structures and design right, small mistakes won't matter at the end.
In my experience, good programmers are not those who have the most attention span, but those who know how to write their code in the way that it will be easy to read and verify. Those who often complain that coding requires "manic attention to detail" don't know how to do that properly. It is very common for novices to create ugly overcomplicated solutions, because they don't know how to structure data and code properly, and then they spend enormous amount of time trying to debug that code.
But you'd never hear someone say that brain surgery is "fun," or that structural engineering is "easy."
No, you won't, because those things are totally different. There are no hobbyist brain surgeons or hobbyist structural engineers (well, maybe the latter, starting on LEGO and working their way up). You can't download some "brain surgery" source code, follow some tutorials, and expect to learn how to do it.
Coding Is Not Fun
Yeah... only it is, though. Lots of people think so.
Coding is the most boring part of app development for me. I pair programmed with a guy who couldn't believe I enjoyed talking to the customers. He loved coding, and we made a great team. I have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, although I admit to writing scripts to do the repetitive parts (data access), but I only enjoy seeing the project come alive. I don't really enjoy coding.
First, programming is fun for a certain sort of person: someone who likes somewhat solitary intellectual puzzles. I do crosswords and sudoku when I have time to burn. It's fun. I like picking through posts online and seeing if they hold up to logic. And I like programming. There's a sort of person who doesn't like somewhat solitary intellectual pursuits. That kind of person won't enjoy programming.
Second, I understand why the top programmers, or quasi-technical managers who are told by their top programmers, think programming is so easy. It's because they're so good at it, and they're projecting. I have a computer science degree and I've been programming for a number of years in a number of languages in a variety of environments. I'm an average programmer but I've been doing it for a number of years and I'm interested in the craft and reading about it and I know a lot of concepts. But each of those concepts has a tree of concepts beneath it, which can have trees of concepts below that. From an end-user programmer's perspective, it's not rocket science but it's a lot of stuff required to really grok the programming universe. Some people grok earlier in their career and some later, but until you grok - it's two different levels of programming quality.
As an engineer who has worked alongside with software engineers for decades, it seems like a fair amount of the pain associated with software engineering is inflicted by the market and big businesses. Why do you have arcane syntax? Why are there no tools to check and automatically correct simple syntax errors? Why are there 50+ different programming languages (I get why there should be more than one, but I can't envision a need for more than maybe 10-12)?
Much of the pain and obscene complexity and continual churn of new languages could be dealt with if software engineers formed a professional organization with the basic charter of approving new languages before they could be put into use. After all, a language is useless unless people use it. With some relatively straight forward guidelines, any new languages wanting to be accepted could be required to use common syntax where appropriate, common commands and so on, at least somewhat simplifying the learning curve and the complexity of writing code on a new platform.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
As a child I found coding fun. How many jobs can you say that you would be doing it for fun if you were not doing it professionally? Sure, professional coding it not the same as the coding you do for enjoyment, and I guess coding isn't for everyone. Some people enjoy coding, many don't. But you don't need school career councillors telling kids coding it fun; if they don't already know it's fun it's probably because it's not; for them.
Building stuff and the satisfaction of watching users, well, use it. If you don't like building stuff that works, maybe you should be a trust fund kid. Ok, I wanna be a trust fund kid. And build stuff. Like software and stuff.
I love programming. I find it extremely fun. It's like having an infinite box of legos and I can build all kinds of things from websites to creative coding projects to games to interactive installation to dating apps whatever.
I'm not saying everyone else should find it fun for some of us it's amazingly fun
Humans have the insight to see what might happen, feel what is coming around the bend, to think ahead.. Plan. Scheme (in a good way). This is the strength of human programming! And the birth of many a hand tuned code.
Coding is an act of creation and creating things is fun. Debugging is fun.
People come home from work coding and start coding again for fun.
What are these people smoking?
I coded until my hands went. And even despite the pain, I still occasionally code because it's so much fun.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Whoever wrote this statement is either looking for someone to beat them down, troll them mightily or they just have waaayyy to high of an opinion of themselves. Seriously. I think troubleshooting and fire-fighting IT problems is a lot more fun challenging than creating the problems with his poorly written code.
Coders are not programmers and neither of those are software engineers. Coders do the rote work of converting a known algorithm into code with no creative thought. Programmers can create an algorithm or improve an algorithm as it works on the computer. A software engineer can design the whole system and understands the concepts of how the system works so they can pick what algorithm is the right way to do things. A coder can only do rudimentary debugging, a programmer can do debugging and problem solving, and a software engineer can design the test system to be able to find the bugs in the first place. Not everyone is capable of being a software engineer. Those people who shouldn't be software engineers are the same people who don't find it fun. If you're doing it just for the money, you're probably not going to have fun, because it's going to be hard for you. As for the ethics, that's a problem for the system engineer.
You can do almost anything "for fun" if it appeals to your nature.
A welder might make a toy at the weekend - for fun.
A surgeon might operate on a frog to teach a child - for fun.
Programming can be done "for fun" but the author rightly points out
that work is work and when your getting paid to develop quality code
that is both secure and bug free, its anything but fun.
Its complex, demanding and prone to error and that does not even include corporate culture :)
it just takes 10,000 hours of hard work to get to the level of mastery needed to look at coding this way.
Creative pursuits are fun and enjoyable, and plenty of people will do them as a hobby. Cooking, writing, painting, etc. Creative pursuits that are regulated and turned into a business process are shit teir IE: short order cook, maintenance programmer, etc.
I saw a discussion similar to this recently about video game design. The opinion was that video games aren't meant to be fun, but engaging. Programming is engaging, and therefore rewarding. And I think when your good at something that is engaging you naturally find it fun.
Ok, don't do it then, to do what is fun.
"It takes a special mind" ok, then you don't have that mind so it's not for you.
The thing is kids, everything isn't for everyone. Being in sales is no fun, for me, at all so I'm not in sales.
Unlike brain surgery or structural engineering. It is like comparing brain surgery simulation. That would be fun
...and structural engineering is easy for someone competent in the discipline. This post presumes a problem where none exists.
What the article is trying to say is that coding is racist and sexist. It is racist because blacks and other minorities who are historically less educated (at least in America) have a hard time getting into the field. It is sexist for the same reasons but replace black and other minorities with women. As the queen mother herself has said......"Everything is racist and everything is sexist." And white people are to blame.
Why the denigration of programming? I suppose, calling it coding is a start. Code is only the middle part of the software development life-cycle. We counter this denigration of the "coding" moniker with the term "software engineering". The source of the denigration of programming is technology management. By breaking down the work of programming into separate tasks, simple-minded managers think they can make the job conceptually simpler. What these managers don't account for is the loss of information between SDLC phases when they're conducted by different people. Agile attempts to rectify the situation, but coding camps either completely ignore or give short shrift to so-called "Upper CASE". You also have authors like Alan Cooper ("About Face") who advocate for the separation of coding and design. That's like saying Bob Dylan shouldn't compose and perform his own music. Whatever your opinion of Dylan's singing voice, I think everyone would agree that strict division of labor would rob the world of unique perspectives and contributions, not to mention progress of any sort. Yes we need more (and better) programmers, especially from under-represented population segments. However, attempting to dumb down an intellectual activity like programming (into "coding") is a silly and cynical attempt to depress wages.
If people spent as much time thinking about the human activities supported by programming, they would realize that programming is a pretty easy human behavior. The world is not constrained by the von Neumann bottleneck.
You need Hacking with the Tao.
See wiki.hackerspaces.org/Zen_Code and be on the Path.
Doing "X" is not fun because I don't like doing "X"
This post can be ignored because it is another case of believing: the way you feel about something dictates how everyone else must feel as well.
I hate it when people go around telling others how to feel about things. You cannot tell me what is good and bad, what is nice and nasty, whether something tastes delicious or awful, what is beauty or what is ugly. You don't know me.
You can't know anyone, except yourself. If you want to know what people think, try asking instead of telling. Stop serving opinion as fact.
The essay has little to do with creative satisfaction, which is what the title implies. Substitute the phrase "light entertainment" for the author's use of "fun", and one gets a slightly better idea of what he seems to be writing about. The article appears to be a social justice essay rather than a technology discussion.
While he makes some interesting, fragmentary points, much of what he wrote is full of unsupported assertions and generalizations, which makes it hard to accept his conclusions. My own experience certainly doesn't agree with his assertions about the nature of the way programmers think.
"I only built the bomb. I didn't DROP it!" - Bryce Lynch.
If coding isn't fun, why do so many people do it as a hobby? I did, and it turned into a career. The most fun part of my job is coding, it's all the corporate bullshit and programme configurations that I loathe. No, the poster is wrong. Coding *is* fun, and it *should* be taught that way. If it's not fun, get out, you don't belong here.
IIRC, there's a chapter in the Kama Sutra about seducing other men's wives, but not one about seducing other women's husbands. Ethical issues right there.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Just saying....
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