Programming Is Mostly Thinking

However, this answer surprised me. In a long Quora post titled "How do programmers code so quickly?" one responder offered that it was a combination of physical skills (muscle memory, skill with tools, debugging skills, typing skill) and knowing where to search for info.

Programmers will gladly explain that the work they did was reading, learning, understanding, sometimes guessing, researching, debugging, testing, compiling, running, hypothesizing and disproving their ideas of what the code should look like. In short, they were thinking and deciding.

Programming is a kind of lossy compression. The code only says what the program must do when it is running. Why a programmer chose one particular way over others, how it influences the rest of the system, what errors were introduced and removed, and what pitfalls it avoids are not (generally) present in the text of the program.

In my years of working with Uncle Bob Martin, I heard him continually tell customers and students that software development is not a fabrication operation, but a design operation. Once the initial design is done, all the duplication is done by machines at nearly zero cost.

I am keenly aware that most management still subscribes to the idea that motion is work. They are fairly convinced that a lack of motion is a lack of work. That makes sense in a lawn care service, a factory assembly line, or a warehouse operation.

Nearly all of the visible work done in producing physical goods is motion. People roll steel, stamp, press, mill, pick and place, bolt/screw/rivet, and on.

Most of the work is not in making the change, but in deciding how to make the change. Deciding requires us to understand the code that already exists. This is especially time-consuming when the code is messy or the design is not very obvious in the source code.

All intellectual activities are hard to observe and monitor. An idea that is 80% complete has no physical manifestation. It's an idea, and it's not done yet. Sometimes we have experiments or proof-of-concept code or notes, but they don't give an accurate "% complete" number as does physical work.

A chair being manufactured looks about 50% done at the 50% mark. When it's done, it looks done.

A design for a chair may not exist on paper until it is more than 70% complete. And we don't know that it's really 70% done, because it's not finished being designed yet.

Software is an intellectual good.