Is programming easier than ever? You're right; I don't want to write scripts to rename a bunch of files in asm. Still, programming isn't easy, as evidenced by

Is programming easier than ever? You're right; I don't want to write scripts to rename a bunch of files in asm. Still, programming isn't easy, as evidenced by how few people there are to look up to in the field relative to the number of participants, many of them themselves somewhat proficient. Our modern languages let us do things that used to be hard in just a few lines, but that just means that we imagine more ambitious projects - so ambitious, in fact, that we coin all sorts of terms like "Test-Driven Development," which is itself nothing more than a moniker for "We know that we're not going to get this right the first time, and even if we get it right later, we should frequently verify that something else doesn't break it." Yes - programming is so easy that changes far away still break things, and despite a lot of theories on modularity and the like, we still don't know how to do it in practice. We all want to figure out how to write better software, but despite all of our languages and methods and collective experiences, we're still not very good at it. That last clause well describes something hard, not something easy.