alt Hacker News> What is hard about it? Young children seem to pick it up with ease. It cannot be that hard?
That's like saying "becoming a writer can't be that hard, since kids learn how to write in the elementary school".
Given a set of requirements, there are many different ways to write a program to satisfy them. Some of those programs will be more efficient than others. Some will scale better. Some will end up having subtle bugs that are hard to reproduce.
> That's like saying "becoming a writer can't be that hard, since kids learn how to write in the elementary school".
Is writing hard? I expect most can agree that determining what to write, especially if you have an objective (e.g. becoming a best-selling novelist), can be extremely hard — but writing itself?
> there are many different ways to write a program to satisfy them.
"What to program" being hard was accepted from the onset and so far we see no disagreement with that.