Why Programming is Difficult (2014)
In my experience, the overwhelmingly most difficult thing about programming is writing code that makes sense, even after it has gone through a couple rounds of requirements changes and bug fixes.<p>Any concrete coding task can be dealt with straightforwardly enough, but projects as a whole tend to deteriorate by arbitrary fixes, maintenance patches, and failure to uphold a conceptual schema.<p>The idea of composability is a good approximation to what it means for a program to make sense. If any part of the program can be understood as a sensible composition of parts, then the program probably makes sense.<p>But so many parts of real world code bases seem to end up incoherent. You look at a function and instead of seeing code that obviously, say, maps the render function over the list of widgets, you see three obscure conditionals, an apologetic comment, a bug tracker issue number, two boolean parameters named "force" and "dontRenderLast" (for some reason), and so on.<p>This is why I think the ideas from "domain-driven design" are so important, including the notion of a ubiquitous domain vocabulary. Also the FP idea of denotational semantics. And that well-known benefit of unit test driven design.<p>There's not enough recognition and clear understanding of this problem, in my opinion. We all know the problem, but somehow we don't talk about it enough, and don't acknowledge it as an enormous problem for development speed, programmer happiness, agility, and so on.