Speaking/writing English is easy. Writing literature at the level of Shakespeare is hard. Writing educational content that makes hard concepts accessible like Grant Sanderson is hard.
Likewise, coding is easy. It's just writing, and any child can learn it. Coding is not programming, and the hard part of the job lives in that distinction.
> Likewise, coding is easy. It's just writing, and any child can learn it.
Any teacher of a low level CS course knows this is completely untrue. In my CS 101 course our problems were relatively straightforward and short, and lots of people struggled mightily to the point of dropping the course. IMO coding requires a particular way of thinking that a large subset of people just aren't good at, and as someone whose done tons of screening interviews at college recruiting fairs where I give relatively easy problems and ask someone to code a solution, I will tell you the idea that anyone can do it is just false.
Why does it have to be Shakespeare? There are millions of good writers that got there by working hard. Seems pointless to go into either extreme, when just being good at anything is generally hard.
It doesn't have to be Shakespeare, but hopefully everybody agrees that writing at Shakespeare's level is indeed hard. I agree that writing good (but not great) or even just ok literature is still hard, but that invites a bunch of no-true-scotsman arguments that I just can't be bothered dealing with (like "writing Fifty Shades of Grey isn't actually hard" or something similar).
The comment I responded to suggested that we don't really have to be "insulted" because code is actually not hard, good code is hard. But the statement "code was never the hard part" doesn't make that distinction, it's a blanket statement, that any normal person would associate with all software. I argue there is no reason to try justifying such a misleading statement.
Completely agree. I feel like lots of comments in this thread are getting side tracked by useless nitpicking, e.g. "Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is." - oy vey.
In it's original context, it's very clear what "Code was never the hard part" was referring to, that of all the steps of product development (ideation, requirements, design, implementation (coding), deployment, operations, maint, etc.), that code was not the hard part. That's the meaning we should be discussing, and I agree with the author, I believe coding very much was the hard part. Since Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were recently in the news, I recall some stories about them fixing issues with the search index in the early days of Google where there were random bit flips that were causing the index to be corrupted, and they fixed it and coded a durable solution. This is very much just a code-specific problem that very, very few other people would have been able to solve.
No basic English is one of the simplest languages to learn as an adult. Perhaps it’s difficult to master.
English has simple conjugations. That makes it much easier to learn to speak intelligibly even for adults. Old English dropped many of the complicated word endings because it was used by Anglo-Saxons with Vikings and Normans.
grammar and rules of language has almost nothing to do with the difficulty of writing good text (ala, written prose fit for purpose).
Understanding of grammar and rules of a language is like having good bricks, but building a stylish house is more than just using good bricks. It's a higher level cognitive exercise. Schools attempt to teach this, but i think they fail quite miserably (look at how essays had to be written by students, and how poorly most are written).
Every language has it's specific difficulties as foreign, the French pronunciation, the Spanish speed, the Chinese ... well leave it. The English has the "easiest difficulty" among all: phrasal verbs, which are of moderate importance and can mostly be avoided.
This property is not so hard to learn and has some advantages, especially in oral form. For example for the words though, tough, through, throw it's easier to learn their pronunciation than their meaning, as well as the multiple meanings of set down, throw off, pull up, bring around, get on, go over. English is a foreign language for me though.
Writing is not easy, and most children need years of training to write at sufficiently good levels. Writing is the technology we invest the most for training on as society
Likewise, coding is easy. It's just writing, and any child can learn it. Coding is not programming, and the hard part of the job lives in that distinction.