Why programming is difficult

At first I thought programming just involved telling a computer what to do, this part of programming is relatively easy. After practicing for twenty odd years I reckoned that this part of programming was pretty easy.

Definition1: A program is something that transforms inputs to outputs,

A programmer is the person who writes the program, and programming is the act of writing this program.

Now let’s add a few constraints to my definition of program.

Definition2: A program is something that transforms inputs to outputs, subject to the following constraints:

• The output of the program is beautiful.
• The input to the program is beautiful.
• The program is beautiful.
• The input to the program is well and correctly documented.
• The program itself is well and correctly documented.
• The program is well tested and proved correct.
• The problem being solved is well specified.
• The problem is well specified.

With these added constraints programming becomes extremely difficult.

Now for a particular problem some of these constraints can be relaxed.

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