The whole “programmers are a special genetically superior elite of deep thinkers” meme really…

The whole “programmers are a special genetically superior elite of deep thinkers” meme really pisses me off.

Like, Piaget demonstrated that young children will teach themselves to program so long as you put them in a situation where they have access to programming tools & where they don’t feel like they’re expected to fail. Since the primary thing preventing children from programming is FUD, this is probably also true of adults.

Occasionally, a programming problem will be difficult, and deep thinking will help you solve it.

But, fuck, when’s the last time any of you had difficulty solving a programming problem wherein the difficulty was essential to the problem, instead of being the direct result of indefensibly short-sighted decisions by somebody else?

Truly hard programming problems that people actually have to solve are rare because people have been searching for them & documenting the best solutions (or proving good solutions don’t or can’t exist) since literally decades before the invention of the electronic stored-program computer.