

Spying on you guys is so much fun - wetzler
http://blog.keen.io/post/33829443341/spying-on-you-guys-is-so-much-fun

======
wetzler
I think some people are misinterpreting "programming is easier than I thought
it would be" to mean "programming is easy".

Just because the barrier to entry is lower than I expected does not mean I
think your job is easy. I have a ton of respect and admiration for developers.
I have led teams of developers that could do things I could never do. There is
no need to get defensive.

The google translate metaphor is actually pretty good. Tech is evolving to
make it much easier to learn. A lot more folks can dive in now. You don't
always need to find a translator :)

~~~
computerslol
Thank you very much for this clarification.

I'm glad you're getting your feet wet.

------
computerslol
"turns out programming is easier than I thought it would be"

:/

~~~
danso
Context:

> _I never thought I’d be “playing with APIs”, but turns out programming is
> easier than I thought it would be. Ruby is a lot more fun than the C++ I
> learned in engineering school. Hours after everyone else in the house went
> to sleep last night, I was here in the office with 10 tabs open in Chrome. I
> was not facebook stalking or reading #binder tweets. I was learning how to
> sort hashes so I could make a list of our top 10 apps by event collection
> size._

As an engineering-degree earner, I concur with her. I learned C, C++, and Java
and decided I didn't want to be a programmer. When I got into a job where I
had to use Ruby to do data-gathering and site building, learning it was much,
much easier than I had anticipated or remembered from com sci classes.

Part of it is obviously already knowing the abstract concepts in programming
and knowing one's way around a command line. A good part of it is the
abundance of online, amazing and free resources to learn from (hence, the 10
tabs open in Chrome...and hell, even that browser flexibility is a nice boost)
compared to what we had 10 years ago.

But the ease of executing a script is a huge part of why programming seems
"easier" than we remember it from Java classes: if I could've learned arrays
through scraping live data and aggregation, the concepts would've been much
more interesting to me.

~~~
computerslol
* Copies and pastes text into google translate * * Clicks the translate button * * Awkwardly reads output phonetically *

Speaking Swahili is easier than I thought! :D

