Programming Sucks

Fairly recently, Paul Ford wrote a piece called What is Code? where he tried to explain programming. This is another piece that takes a different (shall we say realistic) view of programming. If Ford’s article is seeing programming as a cup half-full, this article is seeing programming as a cup half-empty. Both are true, it's just a matter of view point (or current mood).

Firstly programming is hard. Even if you know lots of programming languages that doesn't mean you will understand an application written in any particular language you know.

The first few weeks of any job are just figuring out how a program works even if you’re familiar with every single language, framework, and standard that's involved...

The average life of a programmer on the web, remembering that a programmer is such a wide-reaching term (emphasis added):

Say you're an average web developer. You're familiar with a dozen programming languages, tons of helpful libraries, standards, protocols, what have you. You still have to learn more at the rate of about one a week, and remember to check the hundreds of things you know to see if they’ve been updated or broken and make sure they all still work together and that nobody fixed the bug in one of them that you exploited to do something you thought was really clever one weekend... You're all up to date, so that’s cool, then everything breaks....You are an expert in all these technologies, and that's a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job...And that’s just in your own chosen field, which represents such a tiny fraction of all the things there are to know in computer science you might as well never have learned anything at all. Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works.

The internet is really just being held together by duct tape and glue:

Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There’s a team at a Google office that hasn’t slept in three days. Somewhere there’s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she’s dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants … You can't restart the internet. Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of unofficial agreements and “good enough for now” code with comments like “TODO: FIX THIS IT’S A REALLY DANGEROUS HACK BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT'S WRONG” that were written ten years ago. I haven't even mentioned the legions of people attacking various parts of the internet for espionage and profit or because they’re bored.