I think what makes programming particularly hard is that there is such a large space of possibilities. There's pretty good research out there that people floun

I think what makes programming particularly hard is that there is such a large space of possibilities. There's pretty good research out there that people flounder when there are too many choices. When I was first starting out I remember being paralyzed by that; I could think of several ways to write this one algorithm, and how did I choose? What helped was learning about efficiency in programming, simply because learning "best" practices was a way to limit the space of possibilities. There are, of course, parallel examples of open problems- writing a novel is much the same way, I think. And I think most would agree that writing a novel is also hard. And doing original research also falls under this umbrella.