alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
krackers • yesterday at 11:39 PM
If good writing was easy then "LLM slop writing" wouldn't be a thing.
➕ show 1 reply
> 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?
Being able to transcribe sentences in a certain language is the skill kids pick up in elementary schools. Being a writer requires a whole set of skills built on top of that.
The reason why I brought up that difference in the first place is because both of these are called "writing". When a fan says "I heard the author is writing the next book in the series" or when an author says "I haven't been able to focus on writing due to my health issues", they're not talking about the low-level transcription skill.
> "What to program" being hard was accepted from the onset and so far we see no disagreement with that.
Similar to your interpretation of "writing", you're choosing to interpret "programming" as a process of transcribing an algorithm into a certain programming language, and everything else ends up being defined as "what to program".
That's an overly reductive interpretation, given the original context:
> For reasons which it would take a while to unpack, if is often the case that the best (or sometimes only) way to find out what programming actually needs to be done, is to program something that's not it, and then replace it. This may need to be done multiple times. Programming is only occasionally the final product, it is much more often the means of working through what it is that is actually needed.
> [...]
> Most of what is being done, during programming, is working through the problem space in a way which will make it more obvious what your mistakes are, in your understanding of the problem and what a solution would look like.
Notice that the original comment talks defines "determining what to program" as a process of refining your understanding of the problem itself.
In my reading of the original comment, understanding what your users need is "what to program". Writing code that solves your users' requirements is "programming".