Do What?

Code (n): a system used for brevity or secrecy of communication, in which arbitrarily chosen words, letters, or symbols are assigned definite meanings.

In the modern day with our multi-core multi-gigahertz processors, with our apps for everything even on our phones that we can take with us everywhere, and with decades of steady research and development in computer science, you would think that programming would be pretty easy. I mean anyone can download a free IDE and compiler and just start programming, right?

Sure, if you can learn to read greek and martian, make a prodigious leap from 'hello world' to rocket surgery and then put up with unintelligible libraries with accompanying mountains of opaque documentation. Oh, and it also turns out that most of that crap was useless in the first place or unnecessarily difficult to use otherwise, surprise. All for what? A programming language? A tool whose sole intended purpose is ostensibly to help programmers turn ideas into running applications.

Is programming really difficult though? In general math beyond algebra is rarely encountered, although bitwise operations are a notable addition to the usual repertoire. For most languages the logic isn't terribly complicated either. The biggest barrier to entry, really, is that too many programmers have learned to think and write in a jargon-ridden commercial or unix style. Intimate knowledge of various technologies or insider jargon is often assumed and explanations tend to focus on obscure features or quirks, if they're even recognizable as english at all.

The way most programming languages and their libraries are developed follows a similar pattern. You see a lot of quirky abbreviations that are inconsistent between languages, oftentimes syntax is obstructive and difficult to reason about and in most languages there are also at least some cases where some language feature conflicts with a clean solution. For all the talk about user interface design, the 'user interfaces' to most programming languages are downright atrocious. That's saying nothing about other important language design decisions.

Rarely do you see tutorials that resemble english enough to be intelligible, and which follow a reasonable enough progression in complexity to be useful. Rarely if ever do you see a library that's organized and labeled in a straightforward way. Rarely do you get the feeling that the language designers were really giving serious thought to how to make things simpler or easier, whether it be trivial tasks or more difficult problems (DSLs are beside the point).

Of course, there are also many very interesting problems to be solved and things to be improved upon for specific areas of software design, but when the foundations of all that software are built upon such backward thinking and sometimes misinformation it's kind of hard to ignore. The user is first everywhere else, so why are programmers second-class citizens when it comes to the languages and operating systems that they work with, and why do they insist on making everything seem more complicated than it really is?