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.
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.
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).
The comment I responded to suggested that we don't really have to be "insulted" because code is actually not hard, good code is hard. But the statement "code was never the hard part" doesn't make that distinction, it's a blanket statement, that any normal person would associate with all software. I argue there is no reason to try justifying such a misleading statement.
Completely agree. I feel like lots of comments in this thread are getting side tracked by useless nitpicking, e.g. "Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is." - oy vey.
In it's original context, it's very clear what "Code was never the hard part" was referring to, that of all the steps of product development (ideation, requirements, design, implementation (coding), deployment, operations, maint, etc.), that code was not the hard part. That's the meaning we should be discussing, and I agree with the author, I believe coding very much was the hard part. Since Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were recently in the news, I recall some stories about them fixing issues with the search index in the early days of Google where there were random bit flips that were causing the index to be corrupted, and they fixed it and coded a durable solution. This is very much just a code-specific problem that very, very few other people would have been able to solve.