Speaking/writing English is easy. Writing literature at the level of Shakespeare is hard. Writing educational content that makes hard concepts accessible like Grant Sanderson is hard.

Likewise, coding is easy. It's just writing, and any child can learn it. Coding is not programming, and the hard part of the job lives in that distinction.

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hn_throwaway_99 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Likewise, coding is easy. It's just writing, and any child can learn it.

Any teacher of a low level CS course knows this is completely untrue. In my CS 101 course our problems were relatively straightforward and short, and lots of people struggled mightily to the point of dropping the course. IMO coding requires a particular way of thinking that a large subset of people just aren't good at, and as someone whose done tons of screening interviews at college recruiting fairs where I give relatively easy problems and ask someone to code a solution, I will tell you the idea that anyone can do it is just false.

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hakunin an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Why does it have to be Shakespeare? There are millions of good writers that got there by working hard. Seems pointless to go into either extreme, when just being good at anything is generally hard.

	▲	pdpi 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It doesn't have to be Shakespeare, but hopefully everybody agrees that writing at Shakespeare's level is indeed hard. I agree that writing good (but not great) or even just ok literature is still hard, but that invites a bunch of no-true-scotsman arguments that I just can't be bothered dealing with (like "writing Fifty Shades of Grey isn't actually hard" or something similar).