Difficulty Of Programming

This lies mainly in having to cope with a somewhat arbitrary and unnecessarily complicated system of rules and restrictions (especially the latter).

Are you sure? Might it not be that the things we're trying to do are intrinsically hard? The Russians, I believe, say "A poor dancer blames the slope of the floor." (Only they say it in the RussianLanguage (of course))

P'shaw. Programming is easy. You can just as easily TeachMeToSmoke.

The difficulty of programming is that one is trying to emulate a fuzzy (as in fuzzy logic), adaptive human based process using a fixed, boolean mechanism. In a human process, people adjust and adapt the rules to fit particular contexts. In a software program, the rules are frozen at deployment and the user must find the particular program rule that best fits his situation.

The main difficulty is in determining precisely what the program is supposed to do.

Programmers have two bosses each with its own pacing: 1) the compiler 2) the manager/customer. Because programmers serve two masters, often these masters contradict.

My two bits' worth: the main cause of difficulty in programming is the inappropriateness of the tools we have to work with. Digging a ditch is hard if all you have to work with is a spoon and fork! --PaulMorrison