Programming is a grossly general concept that doesn't really have a precise meaning anymore, if it ever did. Especially these days, programming is associated wi

Programming is a grossly general concept that doesn't really have a precise meaning anymore, if it ever did. Especially these days, programming is associated with developing CRUD or web applications, which make it sound like an easy thing to do and which is relatively easy, at least conceptually. However, programming will be hard if the thing that you are programming for has enough (essential) complexity and there is no way around it, even if you are experienced. Some examples where I found programming to be very hard include - Programming a microcontroller that has a 1400-page reference manual and many conceptually difficult things that you would have to manage. - Taking pseudocode of an algorithm from a research article and turning it into professional, commercial code while handling all the edge cases that were never considered in the article. I believe it was Donald Knuth who claimed that the correct implementation of some 50-line sort algorithm took 30 years to get it finally right. - Constructing the state machine of a complex-enough system and implementing it in code. Take David Harel's Statechart paper, for example, where he builds the state chart of a "simple" Casio wristwatch. Building such a state machine and implementing it in code will always be hard, even if you have more modern tools. So, to reiterate, programming does not just mean downloading some npm library and making API calls to it. When I see comments like "Programming now for 30 years and it's a breeze to pick up new frameworks and ideas", I wonder if people have a very narrow definition of what programming is.