Code is Too Hard To Think About (theatlantic.com)

From a longform piece on The Atlantic: What made programming so difficult was that it required you to think like a computer. The strangeness of it was in some sense more vivid in the early days of computing, when code took the form of literal ones and zeros. Anyone looking over a programmer's shoulder as they pored over line after line like "100001010011" and "000010011110" would have seen just how alienated the programmer was from the actual problems they were trying to solve; it would have been impossible to tell whether they were trying to calculate artillery trajectories or simulate a game of tic-tac-toe. The introduction of programming languages like Fortran and C, which resemble English, and tools, known as "integrated development environments," or IDEs, that help correct simple mistakes (like Microsoft Word's grammar checker but for code), obscured, though did little to actually change, this basic alienation -- the fact that the programmer didn't work on a problem directly, but rather spent their days writing out instructions for a machine. "The problem is that software engineers don't understand the problem they're trying to solve, and don't care to," says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they're too wrapped up in getting their code to work. "Software engineers like to provide all kinds of tools and stuff for coding errors," she says, referring to IDEs. "The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors." When you're writing code that controls a car's throttle, for instance, what's important is the rules about when and how and by how much to open it. But these systems have become so complicated that hardly anyone can keep them straight in their head. "There's 100 million lines of code in cars now," Leveson says. "You just cannot anticipate all these things."

Comments

Not "too" hard, just hard

[gweihir]

At least not too hard for everybody. But the simple plain fact is that thinking about code above a certain minimal complexity requires special talent. Tools, languages, coding-styles, etc. make no real difference.Those that do not have it ( probably something like 95% of all people) should stay away from professional coding. Incidentally, the same applies to mathematical thinking and reasoning, for example. Nothing surprising here, just too many people writing code that do not have what it takes.

Re:Then they're idiots

[gweihir]

Same here. But I see tons of people that either only understand the problem but cannot code or the other way round. Of course there are also people that suck at both. The fact of the matter is that only a small number of people can both code well (including understanding design, architecture, performance, security and reliability) and can understand the application problem well at the same time. Of course the latter is with the help of the customer or user, but even that seems to be too hard for many coders.

It is not laziness or unwillingness, IMO, it is simple inability. And people that can do one of these things well cannot be called stupid by any sane measure either. The problem of doing both things well is just very, very hard.

Re:Obviously bullshit statement there

[michelcolman]

I would bet most of it is in libraries. We need to display this little triangle widget on the screen... ok, found it in this 100 MB library, so we'll just include it and move on to the next problem. Programming is easy!

There's no way you actually need 100 million lines of code to control a car.