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>> This is why things have gotten hard for many people, they don't know how to program But how does this explain programming over the past 30+ years? You can't

>> This is why things have gotten hard for many people, they don't know how to program But how does this explain programming over the past 30+ years? You can't blame code camps as to why programming in the 90's has not gotten a magnitude easier, or even harder as you posit. And what exactly do you mean "how to program"? you throw a lot of shade at the people, institutions and resources involved but don't shine any light on this missing piece...

dragonwriter 7y ago
> You can't blame code camps as to why programming in the 90's has not gotten a magnitude easier It has. Things that were hard problems then are simple tasks today. OTOH, if you want to get paid a princely salary, you have to do the things that are still nontrivial. The stuff that has been trivialized has stopped being valuable, the things that used to be intractable but have been reduced to merely challenging have taken their place as worth paying for.
segmondy 7y ago
Lack of frameworks made things simpler for folks back in the day, they programmed fine by luck. Lack of frameworks meant less distraction. Today, frameworks, libraries, API, platforms, configuration nightmare make things harder for those that don't know how to program because they become distracted. In my opinion, knowing how to program is about knowing exactly where to focus on, where to begin so you can get to the core of the problem. For those that know how or have the intuition, they can move much faster. When I talk about focus, I don't mean concentration, but knowing where to direct your attention. Think of it like triage. But it's even harder. When you have a system, let's say it has 100 components, and it's miss behaving. If you know and understand the system, you can know how to narrow down what the root cause might be. On the other hand, if you have been giving the go ahead to build a system, you might know if you need 10 or 100 components. If you even figure it out, which one do you build face? What order do you build them in? Those matter. This is what I mean by programming. The solution prescribed today is that of design docs, build a prototype, build an MVP, Those I believe help a bit, but not that much.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> You can't blame code camps as to why programming in the 90's has not gotten a magnitude easier It has. Things that were hard problems then are simple tasks today. OTOH, if you want to get paid a princely salary, you have to do the things that are still nontrivial. The stuff that has been trivialized has stopped being valuable, the things that used to be intractable but have been reduced to merely challenging have taken their place as worth paying for.

segmondy 7y ago

Lack of frameworks made things simpler for folks back in the day, they programmed fine by luck. Lack of frameworks meant less distraction. Today, frameworks, libraries, API, platforms, configuration nightmare make things harder for those that don't know how to program because they become distracted. In my opinion, knowing how to program is about knowing exactly where to focus on, where to begin so you can get to the core of the problem. For those that know how or have the intuition, they can move much faster. When I talk about focus, I don't mean concentration, but knowing where to direct your attention. Think of it like triage. But it's even harder. When you have a system, let's say it has 100 components, and it's miss behaving. If you know and understand the system, you can know how to narrow down what the root cause might be. On the other hand, if you have been giving the go ahead to build a system, you might know if you need 10 or 100 components. If you even figure it out, which one do you build face? What order do you build them in? Those matter. This is what I mean by programming. The solution prescribed today is that of design docs, build a prototype, build an MVP, Those I believe help a bit, but not that much.