[danielvaughn]

It's very obviously not "the easy part", it's definitely hard. It's just not the only hard part. And there may be other parts that are harder in some sense.

[jama211]

Something can be hard and also be the easy part. Imagine you got to see into the future and use a popular app before it was released, and you decided to make it yourself and reap the profits. Would be an absolute cinch to copy it compared to trying to make a successful app from a blank page.

[shadowgovt]

Some code is hard. Most business logic (in the sense of pushing data around databases) isn't. The value is in analysis and action, which the system enablrs, not the machine itself.

Creating a high performance general purpose database is hard, but once it exists and is properly configured, the SQL queries are much easier. They'd better be or we wasted a lot of time building that database.

[mountainriver]

Also totally depends on what kind of coding you are doing.

Yeah building a web app can become somewhat easy, but is distributed machine learning? What about low level kernel code?

[skydhash]

Still easy. You just have to learned different concepts. Someone in web needs to be familiar with databases, some protocols like HTTP, DNS, some basic Unix admin,.. Someone in low level kernel code will need to know about hardware architecture, operating system concepts, assembly,... But the coding skill stays the same mostly. You're still typing code, organizing files, and fiddling with build systems.

[jayd16]

The easy part and hard are not mutually exclusive.

[habinero]

Honestly, it really is the easy part of the job. Really truly.

It's difficult when you're first learning but there are definitely much harder skills to learn.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

99.9% of the code i write is easy, but that's just because of the sort of work i do. Its not far from basic CRUD. Maybe with pubsubs and caching thrown in for fun.

But that doesn't mean there isn't some tricksy stuff. All the linear algebra in graphics programming takes awhile to wrap your head around. Actually, game programming in general i find a bit hard. Physics, state management, multi threading, networking...

[carlossouza]

What's easy for some might be truly hard for others.

[danielvaughn]

I'm curious which skills you think are much harder than programming.

[javchz]

Totally. I would add that code that "works" it's easy to do. Code that it's efficient, easy to maintain and safe... That it's another story.

But the sad truth is that most software can be or it's done with shitty code that "kinda works" as long as the CPU it's fast enough.