I&#x27;d be sympathetic with someone saying that software development sucks...in the same way that writing doesn&#x27;t &quot;suck&quot;, but having to be a published writer, e.g. someone who has to churn out something that people notice and will pay for, could be a sucky existence (until you&#x27;re JK Rowling)<p>But programming? It&#x27;s an expression of the mind, and as a nice side benefit, the ability to communicate explicit commands to tireless machines to act on our behalf. There have been a couple of long, recorded speeches that I need to transcribe (for searchability and research purposes) and so I&#x27;ve been checking out the various speech-to-text APIs (Watson and Oxford) as a first step (e.g. before sending it to Mechanical Turk) in automating the process. The APIs are so easy to tinker with that I thought it&#x27;d be fun to pass in clips of Malcolm Tucker to see how well the APIs did. Then I remembered the IDEA project (a collection of audio of people all around the world with various accents attempting to read English) and thought it&#x27;d be interesting to gauge which accents are the hardest for machines to figure out...and all it takes is some scripting to automate the feeding of these recorded clips into the APIs (the analysis is tricky because of the high variance in audio quality, never mind the accents themselves). All of this is useful in figuring out a solution to my original problem, except it&#x27;s a lot more fun and I get to think a lot more about how language works.<p>If I weren&#x27;t a programmer? I&#x27;d set aside a day, brew some coffee, and manually do the tedious work of transcription by re-listening to those speeches several times over just to get them into a text format. How boring.<p>Yeah, programming can be difficult, but it is completely the right level of difficulty for the power it gives us. Even the things that make me nearly throw my laptop into the wall -- such as string encoding -- are a result of something kind of wonderful...the attempt at having an automated, standardized way to translate every squiggle among the hundreds of human languages, and cultural quirks, too, such as a pile of poo.<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve said anything the OP would disagree with. But I kind of checked out after he got into ranting about JavaScript, as if the world needed more bundles of words that insinuate that programming == web development. Things could be smoother, and they are getting that way because of how programming coordinates the flow and storage of information and assertions...but a lot of the OP&#x27;s essay is not much more useful than someone ranting about how literacy sucks because we all can&#x27;t agree what makes for great literature these days.