Why does programming suck?
The article is a long rant, but wrong on more premises and conclusions. And yet, by quoting the people who were actually right in the cases they wrote about, it appears more correct than it is.<p>There are too many wrong &quot;conclusions&quot; and premises in the text, just an example, here&#x27;s the author writing about Babbage&#x27;s and his Analytical Machine:<p>&quot;he was focused on doing math fast and without errors. He didn’t care how complex the machine was as long as it accomplished that.&quot;<p>Of course, not true, Babbage had to care. He was designing a purely mechanical machine for years at the time when nobody had electrical logical circuits. He designed the simplest &quot;universal enough&quot; machine in the limits of the technology of his time. And the design was never built. But to claim that his design was &quot;too complex&quot; the author would have to design a significantly simpler one under the same limitations and goals.<p>The whole article is, unfortunately, like this. Uses something that actually happened or somebody did say, &quot;concludes&quot; something else. And the claims that aren&#x27;t that kind of &quot;conclusions&quot; also sound like from somebody who only very partially understands what he writes about.<p>This doesn&#x27;t mean that the author shouldn&#x27;t attempt to write more articles, he can learn something from it (although I&#x27;d suggest him to base his writing on his own, specific, experiences) just that this article as it is is a quite bad potential basis for a serious discussion, IMHO.<p>He asks &quot;Is there another hardware, general-purpose or not, that would fit our needs more precisely while being cheaper to program?&quot;<p>The answer is a simple &quot;no.&quot; The author just doesn&#x27;t understand how much of everything was invested up to now for him to pay so little for the CPU&#x27;s he uses:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...</a><p>Note just the &quot;plant stat-up costs in billions&quot; column. And that&#x27;s just a piece in the whole puzzle. There are big gains for those who&#x27;d improve a current state, so the humanity as the whole is much more motivated for the real improvements, where they are possible, than the author assumes.<p>When we remove wrong conclusions after quoting others, the rant can be summed up to just a few claims, one of major being &quot;I&#x27;m confronted with different frameworks and libraries, &quot;everybody&quot; solves similar problems, it &quot;sucks&quot; to work this way, maybe the hardware is the main problem.&quot; No.