“The thing that gets lost, and which I think is important to know, is that programming is never easy,” he says. “You’re never doing the same thing twice, because code is infinitely reproducible, so if you’ve already solved a problem and you encounter it again, you just use your old solution. This means that by definition you’re kind of always on this frontier where you’re out of your depth. And one of the things you have to learn is to accept that feeling—of being constantly wrong and not knowing.”
Which sounds like it could be a Buddhist precept. I’m thunderstruck.
“Well, constantly being wrong and out of your depth is not something people are used to accepting. But programmers have to,” he concludes.
Devil in the Stack: Searching for the Soul of the New Machine
Andrew Smith