The most difficult thing about programming

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Everything is working, then it breaks, and you never know why. The technologies we rely on are too numerous and complicated for us to understand them all — this is disempowering. I find this the most difficult thing about being a programmer: the surprise that even we can not understand all the technologies we use.

When I’d finished this article, I wanted to spell check the content. emacs-ispell mode decided to go on strike. It could not find aspell, the program that I use for spelling checking.

My emacs spell checker has worked faithfully on this machine for several years. And just when I complain that I spend half my life fixing things that shouldn’t be broken the emacs spell checker decides to break.

I don’t believe in malicious Gods, nor that the laws of physics are different in the left-hand corner of the sofa in my front room where I’m typing this, though there is circumstantion evidence to suggest the contrary.

I could see no reason why my spelling checker should break – Everything is fine, I have changed nothing. Well I have I installed a new version of Erlang and installed Julia and written some lecture notes since I last spell checked a document.

Fortunately eleven minutes with the Google casino worked. The second suggestion of how to fix my problem worked – and I still don’t know why emacs could not find aspell – and life is too short to find out why.

I guess there are some things we’ll just never know.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://joearms.github.io/2014/02/07/why-programming-is-difficult.html
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