Programming is hard mainly because its open ended. Its not a well defined finite problem. The domain of application keeps expanding and the logic required to or

Programming is hard mainly because its open ended. Its not a well defined finite problem. The domain of application keeps expanding and the logic required to organize information flow keeps getting more complex and varied. It all started as the serial, offline processing of numbers emulating some aspect of the world. Since then you have the major but still largely incomplete revolutions with real time, interactive and concurrent applications. The metaphors have long stopped being numbers. LLM's pretend to encode human language itself. Our entire semantic universe, to the degree it is externalized, is slowly codified and mapped into bits. You also have the deepening of the stack. It started with simple machine code but now you can have like four layers of abstraction to help our poor brains manage torrents of information flows between very complex pieces of hardware. So yeah, programming is hard because we are pushing hard to find the limits of what can be done with digital devices. I dont think we are even halfway there yet. Its going to get much harder :-)