Clive Thompson says programming isn’t hard, it’s frustrating.
Every once in a while, when someone finds out that I’m a writer who dabbles in programming, they’ll ask me: So, is programming hard?
And I usually answer the same way.
“‘Hard’ is the wrong word,” I’ll say. “It’s not so much that it’s hard.
“It’s that it’s frustrating.”…
I interviewed over 200 programmers when I wrote my book Coders, and often they all told me the same thing:
It wasn’t that programming was particularly hard, they said. But it did require a meticulousness of thought, an Xtreme attention to detail, that was more brutal than many other disciplines.
Most of all, they noted that coding required one particular psychological disposition:
A very high tolerance for daily, grinding frustration.
I agree. I’ve told people in the past that I think the most important characteristic of a programmer is a near-infinite tolerance for frustration.