What makes coding difficult?
Is one code the same as another in difficulty?
I’ve been coding for nearly 40 years. Furthermore, I’ve coded Malbolge, FizzBuzz and an OS kernel and there’s no way they’re in the same universe of difficulty.
Saying all programming languages are the same. This is like saying:
All art is just a finite collection of tiny colored dots.
If you’re a robot printer, maybe. However, but for most of us normal engineers out there. The hard part is inventing what we’re going to do given imperfect information, and finite cognitive abilities.
FizzBuzz doesn’t require any creativity as a result of its trivially deterministic nature. Moreover, it just ‘fits in your head’. The very *concept* of a kernel needed to be invented in the late 60s. And iterated on by Very Smart People for decades to get to where we are today. It is not something you can easily hold in your head.
The idea that anyone can bootstrap that expertise as easily as FizzBuzz is like me saying a perfect chess game is just as easy as a bad one, because all I need to do is make the perfect moves.
Moreover, I have one sql query which requires one day of concentration to understand it and even attempt to modify it.
In conclusion, some bits of code are unavoidably hard. All comes down to maintainability. And I’m assuming code has design features with maintainability and readability in mind!
- – Avoid Regex if there is an alternative. Explain in comments exactly how it works with links to the docs.
- – Perl is a curse word alternative rather than saying, “boomer”. Moreover, there is no excuse for Perl.
- – Use a coding language that is easily readable. Python shines out above the rest. Efficiency or premature optimization isn’t normally a concern.
