Programming

17672 readers

96 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

189

What are the craziest misconceptions you’ve heard about programming from people not familiar with it? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

223 comments fedilink hide all child comments

As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren't as familiar with it. It doesn't happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.

I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 63 points 10 months ago (2 children)

They can't possibly judge what is trivial to achieve and what's a serious, very hard problem.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 10 months ago (1 children)

As always, there is an XKCD for that.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The example given in the comic has moved from one category to the other. Determining whether an image contains a bird is a fairly simple "two hour" task now.

Plot twist: The woman in the comic is Fei-Fei Li, she got the research team and five years and succeeded 🤯

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well that's after thousands of people and 100s of millions in money

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Of course, but I still find it remarkable that the task that was picked as an example for something extremely difficult is now trivially easy just a few years later

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That is a pretty hard thing to do, to be fair. And the list of things that are easy sometimes makes big jumps forward and the effect of details on the final effort can be massive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

You're right! Even for programmers.