If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st century

Re:If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st c... by piinbinary on Saturday November 17, 2018 @04:40PM (#18477526)

In support of what your are saying, here are some things that make programming _actually_ difficult:

- Reasoning about what the program should do in edge cases (e.g. if one write succeeds but the other fails)

- Designing data structures to represent complex information (e.g. deciding how to annotate an AST with type information)

- Determining if some functionality of a method is ever used

- Avoiding leaking data, even through side channels (like timing attacks)

- Making an interface that is hard to misuse

- Understanding how to use a poorly designed interface

- Understanding the performance implications of different designs

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Re:If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st c... by reificator on Saturday November 17, 2018 @04:51PM (#18477560)

I'm going to take it one further. All of those are good but I think there are some "easier" and more fundamental things that are massive roadblocks for beginning programmers.

- Understanding the problem itself

- Determining how to actually solve that problem

- Expressing all the details of the solution you've chosen.

- Determining what has gone wrong and why

- Knowing when to step back and try another approach

[ Parent | on HN ]