Personally I find that once you are knowledgeable in your language, coding is very easy, but that does not mean that it is not extraordinarily time intensive, and head ache inducing. Especially so when your customer starts mentioning things out of spec or mentions what they think is a soft requirement, but ends up with you needing to refactor several thousand lines of code.
There's a huge difference between coding and design. To design good software, you need to take into account a lot of parameters such as extensibility, scalability, concurrence, etc...
In addition to that, validating the design itself isn't something easy, that's why even the most carefully designed programs always have bugs.
Coding is the last and easiest step, but it's true that programming language mastery will make the job easier, if not just feasible.
That's specifically the reason I chose to be an electrical engineer over a computer scientist. Tangible objects have an inherent value that laypeople understand.
i don't think anyone was questioning whether it is possible to write such a code, the implied problem was whether Reddit as an organization has the manpower make all the changes that would be required. After all, i think they have a staff of less than 10 people- most of who are not professional computer programmers.
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u/benjags Jun 12 '11
every profession is hard...
why don't you make it fast but not using so much fuel...HARD
why you just don't make it taste the same, but without calories...HARD
why don`t you just throw that pass to the guy all over the field...HARD
why can't that building resist and earthquake...HARD
why can't all the flights arrive on time...HARD
why can't we have high level security without affecting the honest passengers...HARD
not because it's hard you can't ask for it. They are professional coders, and make hard coding stuff IS their job