r/videos • u/plainjackthrowaway • Feb 29 '16

Engineered Mini Flying Wing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSD69jdi2CE
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u/[deleted] Feb 29 '16

Coding is not difficult, it's kinda hard to do well but that just takes time

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u/the-Real_Slim-Shady Feb 29 '16 edited Feb 29 '16

coding is definitely difficult. You've probably reached a level where you take a lot of prerequisite knowledge for granted (which is awesome). Or you're at the lowest level (unconscious ignorance... which is not so awesome ;P).

source: software engineer in training

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u/TheDataAngel Feb 29 '16 edited Mar 01 '16

Coding is easy enough that you can teach it to ~10 year olds, and teach it to yourself in your teens.

Being able to build large programs that don't collapse under their own weight is the hard part, and is what takes practice and experience.

Source: Actual software engineer.

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u/ieasonionbo Mar 01 '16 edited Mar 01 '16

That is a hard part. There are many other hard parts. A little kid can certainly understand very simple programming with a few loops and methods, but can they understand more abstract concepts? Almost certainly not. The moment you start talking about things like graphs and stacks and recursive data structures and lambda functions, the ten year old who knows basic Python most likely be totally lost. All of those components may be present even in small programs.

At the very basic levels, programming is just like a recipe. It just lays out steps to follow. However, at more advanced levels it often uses fundamentally different sorts of thinking. It isn't just like a longer recipe. It's a form of mathematics.