Masterminds of Programming

Preface

WRITING SOFTWARE IS HARD—AT LEAST, WRITING SOFTWARE THAT STANDS UP UNDER TESTS, TIME, and different environments is hard. Not only has the software engineering field struggled to make writing software easier over the past five decades, but languages have been designed to make it easier. But what makes it hard in the first place?

Most of the books and the papers that claim to address this problem talk about architecture, requirements, and similar topics that focus on the software. What if the hard part was in the writing? To put it another way, what if we saw our jobs as programmers more in terms of communication—language—and less in terms of engineering?

Children learn to talk in their first years of life, and we start teaching them how to read and write when they are five or six years old. I don’t know any great writer who learned to read and write as an adult. Do you know any great programmer who learned to program late in life?

And if children can learn foreign languages much more easily than adults, what does this tell us about learning to program—an activity involving a new language?

Imagine that you are studying a foreign language and you don’t know the name of an object. You can describe it with the words that you know, hoping someone will understand what you mean. Isn’t this what we do every day with software? We describe the object we have in our mind with a programming language, hoping the description will be clear enough to the compiler or interpreter. If something ...